Prevalence Effect in a Laboratory Environment

Abstract

The consistency in the results and the size of this study suggest that with laboratory conditions, if a prevalence effect exists, it is quite small in magnitude; hence, it will not likely alter conclusions derived from such studies.

Systematic review: Bias in imaging studies - the effect of manipulating clinical context, recall bias and reporting intensity

“…; one was suitable [25]. The secondary search (Table 2) identified 2828 publications with the full text retrieved for 34: ultimately 6 were included [6,13,[26][27][28][29] and 28 rejected because the research focused on case-specific information. The tertiary search (Table 3) identified 74 MeSH terms which were combined into 18 Boolean search strings: These identified 111 potential articles with a further 2 via snowballing; 5 articles were ultimately included [11,12,[30][31][32].…”

“…While these potential "laboratory effects" [10,11] have been discussed in the methodology literature [6,[11][12][13][14], their impact remains unverified. To attempt to quantify their magnitude, we performed a systematic review of studies where the context of interpretation was manipulated or investigated (i.e.…”

Do prevalence expectations affect patterns of visual search and decision-making in interpreting CT colonography endoluminal videos?

“…For example, Gur et al 5 found that varying prevalence levels between 2% and 21% did not affect the diagnostic accuracy of chest radiograph assessment. Likewise, we did not find a prevalence effect for our three primary outcomes, which were chosen to represent visual search and decisionmaking.…”

“…In 2011, a systematic review 3 found only three medical imaging studies [4][5][6] that assessed the impact of experimentally modified prevalence on reader diagnosis. Subsequent studies have been published, [7][8][9][10] but the relationship between prevalence and interpretation accuracy remains unclear.…”

“…7 This "rare target" effect has also been reported in non-clinical scenarios, such as baggage scanning 12,13 and artificial target search experiments. 14 By contrast, in chest radiography, the evidence for a prevalence effect on diagnostic accuracy is weaker, 5,9 although two studies that used eye tracking to monitor visual search of experienced readers suggested a possible association between increased prevalence and the duration and pattern of image scrutiny. 10,15 Despite increasing use of CT colonography (CTC) in routine practice, there is little research describing the effect of abnormality prevalence on diagnostic performance.…”