New methods give better estimates of changes in diagnostic accuracy when prior information is provided

Inter-observer agreement for abdominal CT in unselected patients with acute abdominal pain

“…Observers had access to a summary of the patients' clinical history, physical examination (both performed by an attending surgical resident) and to the laboratory findings of the day of presentation, as in normal clinical practice observers also would have access to clinical information of the patient [11]. An example of summary patient information is provided in Appendix I.…”

Systematic review: Bias in imaging studies - the effect of manipulating clinical context, recall bias and reporting intensity

“…; one was suitable [25]. The secondary search (Table 2) identified 2828 publications with the full text retrieved for 34: ultimately 6 were included [6,13,[26][27][28][29] and 28 rejected because the research focused on case-specific information. The tertiary search (Table 3) identified 74 MeSH terms which were combined into 18 Boolean search strings: These identified 111 potential articles with a further 2 via snowballing; 5 articles were ultimately included [11,12,[30][31][32].…”

“…The remaining 9 studies investigated observer performance in different situations with fixed prevalence: 4 compared performance in the laboratory to daily practice [10,12,32]; 3 investigated observer blinding to previous clinical investigations [29][30][31]; 1 investigated training [27]; 1 investigated varying reporting conditions [25]; 1 investigated recall bias [28]. The 4 studies that investigated interpretation in "the field" used retrospective data obtained from normal clinical practice [10,12,25,32].…”

The effect of clinical history on accuracy of electrocardiograph interpretation among doctors working in emergency departments

“…Clinicians may have also combined history with ECG findings to make their ECG diagnoses, rather than interpreting ECGs independently. 13 This suggests that ECG interpretation may not be independent of the pre-test probability, contrary to the traditional Bayesian approach to clinical reasoning.…”

“…[1][2][3][4]9,[13][14][15][16][17][18] One approach is to interpret test results without clinical history (to facilitate unbiased reading) and then reinterpret with the history.…”