A new method for the interpretation of veterinary forensic necropsy and PMCT finding with Bayesian decision theory

This study aimed to understand the probability of death, given that a necropsied animal presented a specific RF. To estimate all contributions of the 48 RF, we designed a simple survey based on the Delphi method. In this survey, we invited veterinarians to evaluate the 48 NF and to assign a grade in a Likert scale from 0 to 10 for each of the RFs. In this scale, 0 (zero) indicates that the NF does not contribute to the animal's death, and 10 (ten) indicates that this NFdoes totally contributes to the animal's death. Therefore, each veterinarian, according to their own professional experience, assigns a grade describing how important each necroscopic finding is to the animal's death. Our results demonstrated that the problem of sensitivity analysis in the absence of a gold standard could be circumvented by the method proposed here.
Source: Journal of Forensic Radiology and Imaging - Category: Radiology Source Type: research