Continuous Readout versus Titer-Based Assays of Influenza Vaccine Trials: Sensitivity, Specificity, and False Discovery Rates.

Continuous Readout versus Titer-Based Assays of Influenza Vaccine Trials: Sensitivity, Specificity, and False Discovery Rates. Comput Math Methods Med. 2019;2019:9287120 Authors: Li D, Wang J, Garigen J, Treanor JJ, Zand MS Abstract The current gold standard for measuring antibody-based immunity to influenza viruses relies on the hemagglutinin inhibition assay (HAI), an 80-year-old technology, and the microneutralization assay (MN). Both assays use serial dilution to provide a discrete, ranked readout of 8-14 categorical titer values for each sample. In contrast to other methods of measuring vaccine antibody levels that produce a continuous readout (i.e., mPLEX-Flu and ELISA), titering methods introduce imprecision and increase false discovery rates (FDR). In this paper, we assess the degree of such statistical errors, first with simulation studies comparing continuous data with titer data in influenza vaccine study group comparison analyses and then by analyzing actual sample data from an influenza vaccine trial. Our results show the superiority of using continuous, rather than discrete, readout assays. Compared to continuous readout assays, titering assays have a lower statistical precision and a higher FDR. The results suggested that traditional titering assays could lead to increased Type-II errors in the comparison of different therapeutic arms of an influenza vaccine trial. These statistical issues are related to the mathematic...
Source: Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine - Category: Statistics Tags: Comput Math Methods Med Source Type: research