Evaluation of indirect fluorescent antibody test (IFAT) for the diagnosis and screening of lumpy skin disease using Bayesian method

The performance of indirect fluorescence antibody test (IFAT) for serological diagnosis and screening of lumpy skin disease (LSD) was evaluated using methods without gold standard. Virus neutralization test (VNT) was used as the second test and the study sites were selected from two different geographical places in Ethiopia to get different disease prevalence. The analysis of conditional dependent Bayesian model for the accuracy of IFAT showed that sensitivity, specificity, prevalence of the population Pi1 and the population Pi2 were 0.92 (0.89–0.95), 0.88 (0.85–0.91), 0.28 (0.25–0.32) and 0.06 (0.048–0.075), respectively. The posterior inferences obtained for VNT sensitivity, specificity and conditional correlation between the tests for sensitivity (rhoD) and specificity (rhoDc) were 0.78 (0.74–0.83), 0.97 (0.95–0.99), 0.052 (−0.03–0.15) and 0.019 (−0.01–0.06), respectively. The interval estimation of conditional correlation for both sensitivity and specificity clusters around zero and thus conditional dependence between the two tests was not significant. Although accuracy measure would not be the only basis for test selection, the result of our study demonstrated that IFAT has a reasonable high accuracy to be used for the diagnosis and sero-surveillance analysis of LSD in the target population.