Sensitivity of diagnostic tests for human soil-transmitted helminth infections: a meta-analysis in the absence of a true gold standard.

ABSTRACT: Reliable, sensitive and practical diagnostic tests are an essential tool in disease control programmes for mapping, impact evaluation and surveillance. To provide a robust global assessment of the relative performance of available diagnostic tools for the detection of soil-transmitted helminths, we conducted a meta-analysis comparing the sensitivities and the quantitative performance of the most commonly used copro-microscopic diagnostic methods for soil-transmitted helminths, namely Kato-Katz, direct microscopy, formol-ether concentration, McMaster, FLOTAC and Mini-FLOTAC. In the absence of a perfect reference standard, we employed a Bayesian latent class analysis to estimate the true, unobserved sensitivity of compared diagnostic tests for each of the soil-transmitted helminth species As

SUBMITTER: Nikolay B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4186778 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature