Development and application of a novel metric to assess effectiveness of biomedical data. Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • OBJECTIVE: Design a metric to assess the comparative effectiveness of biomedical data elements within a study that incorporates their statistical relatedness to a given outcome variable as well as a measurement of the quality of their underlying data. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The cohort consisted of 874 patients with adenocarcinoma of the lung, each with 47 clinical data elements. The p value for each element was calculated using the Cox proportional hazard univariable regression model with overall survival as the endpoint. An attribute or A-score was calculated by quantification of an element's four quality attributes; Completeness, Comprehensiveness, Consistency and Overall-cost. An effectiveness or E-score was obtained by calculating the conditional probabilities of the p-value and A-score within the given data set with their product equaling the effectiveness score (E-score). RESULTS: The E-score metric provided information about the utility of an element beyond an outcome-related p value ranking. E-scores for elements age-at-diagnosis, gender and tobacco-use showed utility above what their respective p values alone would indicate due to their relative ease of acquisition, that is, higher A-scores. Conversely, elements surgery-site, histologic-type and pathological-TNM stage were down-ranked in comparison to their p values based on lower A-scores caused by significantly higher acquisition costs. CONCLUSIONS: A novel metric termed E-score was developed which incorporates standard statistics with data quality metrics and was tested on elements from a large lung cohort. Results show that an element's underlying data quality is an important consideration in addition to p value correlation to outcome when determining the element's clinical or research utility in a study.

published proceedings

  • BMJ Open

altmetric score

  • 1

author list (cited authors)

  • Bloom, G. C., Eschrich, S., Han, G., Hang, G., Schabath, M. B., Bhansali, N., ... Fenstermacher, D. A.

citation count

  • 1

complete list of authors

  • Bloom, Gregory C||Eschrich, Steven||Han, Gang||Hang, Gang||Schabath, Matthew B||Bhansali, Neera||Hoerter, Andrew M||Morgan, Scott||Fenstermacher, David A

publication date

  • August 2013

publisher

  • BMJ  Publisher