bcROCsurface: an R package for correcting verification bias in estimation of the ROC surface and its volume for continuous diagnostic tests

Abstract

Background

Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) surface analysis is usually employed to assess the accuracy of a medical diagnostic test when there are three ordered disease status (e.g. non-diseased, intermediate, diseased). In practice, verification bias can occur due to missingness of the true disease status and can lead to a distorted conclusion on diagnostic accuracy. In such situations, bias–corrected inference tools are required.

Results

This paper introduce an R package, named bcROCsurface, which provides utility functions for verification bias–corrected ROC surface analysis. The shiny web application of the correction for verification bias in estimation of the ROC surface analysis is also developed.

Conclusion

bcROCsurface may become an important tool for the statistical evaluation of three–class diagnostic markers in presence of verification bias. The R package, readme and example data are available on CRAN. The web interface enables users less familiar with R to evaluate the accuracy of diagnostic tests, and can be found at http://khanhtoduc.shinyapps.io/bcROCsurface_shiny/.