Sensitivity And Specificity In Health Care Essay

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Healthcare scientists usually carry out a variety of clinical tests in order to obtain accurate and reliable results. In order to introduce new tests into this routine, we must first determine the sensitivity and specificity of the potential test. Sensitivity is the ability of a test to identify true positives within a population. In a clinical setting, the sensitivity of the test determines its ability to correctly identify a patient with a disease. This can be displayed as a formula: Sensitivity=True positives/True Positives+ False negatives True positives are the number of patients within a given population that are correctly diagnosed with having the disease while false negatives are the patients within the same population that have the disease …show more content…

The same concept of percentage applies to specificity as seen in sensitivity where 100% specificity indicates that a test is able to identify all the true negatives within a population. Therefore a decrease in specificity increases the number of people who are diagnosed with the disease but are in fact false positives. Linearity of a test method is its ability (within a given range) to obtain results directly proportional to the concentration of the analyte in the sample. This can be seen during a series dilution where each dilution should have a direct proportion to the concentration or during a first order chemical reaction. Linearity can be used to conduct a calibration verification where a mock sample with a known concentration containing martials commonly found in a patient sample are used to prove that the test/instrument is properly calibrated throughout the reportable reference range of patient

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