DTAmetasa: An R shiny application for meta-analysis of diagnostic test accuracy and sensitivity analysis of publication bias

Abstract

Meta-analysis of diagnostic test accuracy (DTA) is a powerful statistical method for synthesizing and evaluating the diagnostic capacity of medical tests and has been extensively used by clinical physicians and healthcare decision-makers. However, publication bias (PB) threatens the validity of meta-analysis of DTA. Some statistical methods have been developed to deal with PB in meta-analysis of DTA, but implementing these methods requires high-level statistical knowledge and programming skill. To assist non-technical users in running most routines in meta-analysis of DTA and handling with PB, we developed an interactive application, DTAmetasa. DTAmetasa is developed as a web-based graphical user interface based on the R shiny framework. It allows users to upload data and conduct meta-analysis of DTA by “point and click” operations. Moreover, DTAmetasa provides the sensitivity analysis of PB and presents the graphical results to evaluate the magnitude of the PB under various publication mechanisms. In this study, we introduce the functionalities of DTAmetasa and use the real-world meta-analysis to show its capacity for dealing with PB.