Ego bias, reverse ego bias, and physiciansʼ prognostic

Studies reporting ROC curves of diagnostic and prediction data can be incorporated into meta-analyses using corresponding odds ratios

“…The limited accuracy of the former group may create numerical problems in the meta-analysis, because one then has only limited implied precision on the corresponding estimates of OR. For example, the study by Poses et al [10] gives the AUC for physicians' predictions as 0.82 (i.e., to two d.p.). From equation (1) we find that this value is compatible with (to an accuracy of one d.p.)…”

“…Two of the ROC studies [10,12] in Table 1 reported empirical SEs for their AUC values, for each of the clinician and scoring system predictions. Numerical comparisons revealed that these were close to the SEs obtained from our delta method calculation.…”

“…As seen in Table 1, the Christensen et al paper [9] has a fairly typical sample size. We also checked the accuracy of the Zhou et al approximation using the physicians' predictions from the Poses et al study [10] that has the smallest sample size. Here the discrepancy of the approximation was approximately 4.5%.…”

“…Hanley and McNeil [3] also indicate that the distribution of the AUC estimate will not display significant skewness as long as the number of misclassified pairs (conceptually, the pairs are made up of individuals with and without events) is less than five. The worst-case scenario for our example is exemplified by the study of Poses et al [10], which has the smallest total sample size and the smallest number of deaths. The expected number of misclassified pairs for the Poses et al study is approximately 12, well above the Hanley and McNeil threshold.…”

Decisão mecânica ou biológica?

“…In addition, habit passes on a positive view of conduct whose construction usually is seasoned by an egocentric bias synthesized as: physicians believe their own patients evolve better than those of their colleagues 28 .…”