New confidence intervals for the difference between two sensitivities at a fixed level of specificity

Abstract

For two continuous-scale diagnostic tests, it is of interest to compare their sensitivities at a predetermined level of specificity. In this paper, we propose three new intervals for the difference between two sensitivities at a fixed level of specificity. These intervals are easy to compute. We also conduct simulation studies to compare the relative performance of the new intervals with the existing normal-approximation-based interval proposed by Wieand et al. Our simulation results show that the newly proposed intervals perform better than the existing normal-approximation-based interval in terms of coverage accuracy and interval length. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.