The approaches of rating the quality of evidence of systematic reviews of diagnostic accuracy tests are different from systematic reviews of interventional studies. This article systematically introduces the application of GRADE in systematic reviews of diagnostic accuracy tests by a case interpretation and analysis. In this article we present rating workflow in systematic reviews of diagnostic accuracy tests and introduce how to use the GDT website to display the rating results, and interpret the conclusion of systematic reviews based on GRADE results.
The mada package is a type of package that is especially used for implementing meta-analysis of diagnostic accuracy tests. This package is developed on basis of classical statistical theories and it can be used to calculate all relevant effect size of diagnostic accuracy tests; however, it does not provide pooled values of sensitivity and specificity. This article uses an example to introduce the whole functions of mada package in implementing meta-analysis of diagnostic accuracy tests, including data preparation, calculation implementation, result summary, and plots drawing.