Receiver operating characteristic curve: overview and practical use for clinicians

🤖 Plain-English Summary

Using diagnostic testing to determine the presence or absence of a disease is essential in clinical practice. Although clinicians who do not have expertise in statistics do not need to understand both the complex mathematical equation and the analytic process of ROC curves, understanding the core concepts of the ROC curve analysis is a prerequisite for the proper use and interpretation of the ROC curve.

🔑 Key Findings

• In many cases, test results are obtained as continuous values and require a process of conversion and interpretation and into a dichotomous form to determine the presence of a disease.
• The primary method used for this process is the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve.
• The ROC curve is used to assess the overall diagnostic performance of a test and to compare the performance of two or more diagnostic tests.

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