G. Corrao et al., NONINVASIVE DIAGNOSIS OF LIVER-CIRRHOSIS - A COMPARISON BETWEEN 4 DISCRIMINANT FUNCTIONS, Revue d'epidemiologie et de sante publique, 41(2), 1993, pp. 123-130
We assessed the performance of 4 methods of discriminant analysis usin
g as independent variables the age and 16 serum tests, for correctly i
dentifying patients with liver cirrhosis among hospitalized patients a
ffected by chronic liver disease without signs of liver failure; 290 p
atients entered this study: on the basis of laparoscopy with or withou
t liver biopsy, 152 patients had a diagnosis of liver cirrhosis and 13
8 were classified as chronic hepatitic patients. Due to the non-multin
ormal distribution of the variables used and to the unequality of the
variance-covariance matrices, we compared the following 4 methods: lin
ear discriminant function, quadratic discriminant function, non-parame
tric discriminant function and logistic regression. The Receiver Opera
ting Characteristic (ROC) analysis was used to compare diagnostic abil
ity of the assessed methods: the quadratic discriminant function was t
he best performing method. The predictive ability of this function was
compared to that reported for percutaneous liver biopsy, showing that
this simple statistical method using age and biochemical tests can ef
ficiently identify liver cirrhosis in the setting of chronic liver dis
ease, reducing the need for invasive diagnostic procedures.