Journal of Pediatric Care

What Criteria should be met before a New Diagnostic Test is Deployed in Clinical Practice

Diagnostic tests are an important resource which facilitate clinical decision making with appropriate therapeutic options so that health outcomes for children are optimised. Diagnostic tests must be accurate (distinguish those with disease from the healthy population) and must have precision (that on average two measurements taken over a short period of time will be the same). However, there are no minimal performance criteria for the introduction of non-invasive tests into clinical practice. Despite efforts to improve the reporting of the evaluation of diagnostic tests much remains to be achieved. Many diagnostic tests are introduced into paediatric practice based on adult data and even when new non-invasive diagnostic instruments are evaluated in children the precision dimension is often poorly evaluated. Transient Elastography (TE) is a new non-invasive test for the diagnosis of liver disease in adults and children. We use our experience with TE to highlight the care which must be taken before adopting a new non-invasive test in paediatrics.

Author(s):

Marion Rowland

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