Methodological advancements on inter-laboratory diagnostic test evaluation

Diagnostic test evaluation provides information that is fundamental to the use of test results to infer the presence, prevalence, or absence of a disease in a population. However, it is often difficult for a single laboratory to achieve a sufficient number of reference samples of known disease status on which to perform a formal test evaluation based on gold standards. This project aims to evolve the concept of proficiency testing into an inter-laboratory diagnostic test evaluation, by developing specialised Bayesian latent class models to simultaneously estimate the accuracy of diagnostic tests used in laboratories operating in different countries. Within this scope, our consortium of laboratory experts and epidemiologists will investigate the diagnostic accuracy of various assays currently used by the national reference laboratories of France, Sweden, the UK, and the Netherlands to detect the presence of infectious bovine rhinotracheitis (IBR) and bovine viral diarrhoea (BVD) from routinely collected serum samples with unknown disease status.