Sensitivity Or Specificity? Which Would YOU Prefer?

A typical day at work...from I Love Lucy, first aired September 15, 1952There are days when the grind feels a lot like Lucy's candy factory as seen in the clip above. But the beat goes on, the images keep coming, and they have to be read. As one of my professors used to say, "Miss 'em slow, or miss 'em fast, boys!" Of course, that was a joke. Of course it was. Definitely.You probably know the difference between sensitivity and specificity. In essence, sensitivity is the percentage of the time you find something that is actually present. Specificity is the percentage of the time you don't find something when nothing is there. In other words, were I 100% sensitive, I would find every cancer that comes through on the PACS worklist. Were I 100% specific, everyone I declare negative will truly be without disease. Put in tabular form (courtesy of Penn State's online Stat course):I want all my positives and negatives to be true, with no false positives (saying there is disease when there isn't) or false negatives (saying there is no disease when there is.)There is a whole science surrounding this stuff. Everyone, and particularly every radiologist, has a different set of sensitivities and specificities, and this is all wrapped up in a concept called Receiver-Operating Characteristics, or ROC. From MediCalc:In a Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve the true positive rate (Sensitivity) is plotted in function of the false positive rate (100-Specificity) for different cut-off p...
Source: Dalai's PACS Blog - Category: Radiologists Source Type: blogs