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An extended trivariate vine copula mixed model for meta-analysis of diagnostic studies in the presence of non-evaluable outcomes

  • Aristidis K. Nikoloulopoulos ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: August 10, 2020

Abstract

A recent paper proposed an extended trivariate generalized linear mixed model (TGLMM) for synthesis of diagnostic test accuracy studies in the presence of non-evaluable index test results. Inspired by the aforementioned model we propose an extended trivariate vine copula mixed model that includes the TGLMM as special case, but can also operate on the original scale of sensitivity, specificity, and disease prevalence. The performance of the proposed vine copula mixed model is examined by extensive simulation studies in comparison with the TGLMM. Simulation studies showed that the TGLMM leads to biased meta-analytic estimates of sensitivity, specificity, and prevalence when the univariate random effects are misspecified. The vine copula mixed model gives nearly unbiased estimates of test accuracy indices and disease prevalence. Our general methodology is illustrated by meta-analysing coronary CT angiography studies.


Corresponding author: Aristidis K. Nikoloulopoulos, School of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK, E-mail:

Funding source: University of East Anglia

Acknowledgements

The simulations presented in this paper were carried out on the High Performance Computing Cluster supported by the Research and Specialist Computing Support service at the University of East Anglia.

  1. Author contribution: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission.

  2. Research funding: None declared.

  3. Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding this article.

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Supplementary Material

The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/ijb-2019-0107).


Received: 2019-09-25
Accepted: 2020-04-06
Published Online: 2020-08-10

© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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