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Hampton R. Bates, MD
Richmond, Va

JAMA. 1989;262(3):350-351.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

The article concerning postmortem evaluation of clinical diagnostics during five decades¹ is a good effort to analyze disparate data that can be resistant to marshaling by ordinary statistical methods. However, I think that the true-negative category, within the constraints of this study, is largely a passive statistic that sheds little light on the diagnostic process. This occurs because the act of making a clinical diagnosis leads to a mutually exclusive binomial distribution of that diagnosis vs a statistical universe of other diagnoses, many of which are trivial. On the other hand, "agreed" (true positives), "underdiagnosed" (false negatives), and "overdiagnosed" (false positives) are intuitively satisfying categories that present a more realistic picture of actual practice.

Another statistical method avoids the true-negative dilemma by using only those cells of the fourfold (2 x 2) tables that can be occupied by at least one positive diagnosis (clinical or autopsy). . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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