Applications of ROC Analysis in Medical Research

With the growing focus on comparative effectiveness research and personalized medicine, receiver-operating characteristic analysis can continue to play an important role in health care decision making. Specific applications of receiver-operating characteristic analysis include predictive model assessment and validation, biomarker diagnostics, responder analysis in patient-reported outcomes, and comparison of alternative treatment options. The authors present a survey of the potential applications of the method and briefly review several relevant extensions. Given the level of attention paid to biomarker validation, personalized medicine and comparative effectiveness research, it is highly likely that the receiver-operating characteristic analysis will remain an important visual and analytic tool for medical research and evidence-based medicine in the foreseeable future.