<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//NLM//DTD JATS (Z39.96) Journal Publishing DTD v1.0 20120330//EN" "JATS-journalpublishing1.dtd">
<article xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" article-type="research-article">
  <front>
    <journal-meta>
      <journal-id journal-id-type="publisher-id">JDS</journal-id>
      <journal-title-group>
        <journal-title>Journal of Data Science</journal-title>
      </journal-title-group>
      <issn pub-type="epub">1680-743X</issn>
      <issn pub-type="ppub">1680-743X</issn>
      <publisher>
        <publisher-name>SOSRUC</publisher-name>
      </publisher>
    </journal-meta>
    <article-meta>
      <article-id pub-id-type="publisher-id">060101</article-id>
      <article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.6339/JDS.2008.06(1).368
</article-id>
      <article-categories>
        <subj-group subj-group-type="heading">
          <subject>Research Article</subject>
        </subj-group>
      </article-categories>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Estimating Optimum Linear Combination of Multiple Correlated Diagnostic Tests at a Fixed Specificity with Receiver Operating Characteristic Curves</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <name>
            <surname>Gao</surname>
            <given-names>Feng</given-names>
          </name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="j_JDS_aff_000"/>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="j_JDS_aff_000">Washington University in St. Louis</aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <volume>6</volume>
      <issue>1</issue>
      <fpage>1</fpage>
      <lpage>13</lpage>
      <permissions>
        <ali:free_to_read xmlns:ali="http://www.niso.org/schemas/ali/1.0/"/>
      </permissions>
      <abstract>
        <p>Abstract: Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) methodology is widely used to evaluate diagnostic tests. It is not uncommon in medical practice that multiple diagnostic tests are applied to the same study sample. A va riety of methods have been proposed to combine such potentially correlated tests to increase the diagnostic accuracy. Usually the optimum combina tion is searched based on the area under a ROC curve (AUC), an overall summary statistics that measures the distance between the distributions of diseased and non-diseased populations. For many clinical practitioners, however, a more relevant question of interest may be ”what the sensitivity would be for a given specificity (say, 90%) or what the specificity would be for a given sensitivity?”. Generally there is no unique linear combination superior to all others over the entire range of specificities or sensitivities. Under the framework of a ROC curve, in this paper we presented a method to estimate an optimum linear combination maximizing sensitivity at a fixed specificity while assuming a multivariate normal distribution in diagnostic tests. The method was applied to a real-world study where the accuracy of two biomarkers was evaluated in the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. The performance of the method was also evaluated by simulation studies.</p>
      </abstract>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
</article>
