Estimating diagnostic accuracy of fecal culture in liquid media for the detection of Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis infections in Québec dairy cows: A latent class model

In conclusion, a higher sensitivity of IFC compared to serum-ELISA was observed both in the unconditional and conditional dependent models. Since the sensitivity of both IFC and serum-ELISA was relatively low, conditional dependence between the tests is more likely in the true disease positive animals. We hypothesize that conditional dependence arises because an unmeasured covariate influences the performance of both tests among disease positive animals causing both tests to incorrectly misclassify the animal as negative. One limitation of this study was the very low within herd prevalence of the participant herds.
Source: Preventive Veterinary Medicine - Category: Veterinary Research Source Type: research