Maximum likelihood estimation and hypothesis test of areas under receiver operating characteristic(ROC) curves

Objective To explore receiver operating characteristic(ROC) analysis method with paired datasets in medical diagnostic tests.Methods On the basis of binormal model,maximum likelihood estimation was applied to areas calculation,and approximately normal method to confidence interval estimation and hypothesis test.Results By the iterative procedure,ML estimation and standard errors of ROC curve parameters a and b,ROC-area index Az were obtained and hypothesis test statistic U value could be caculated.Conclusion ROC analysis can be applied to analyse and evaluate the diagnostic test with paired data,including continuous data and rank-ordered data.