do combination tests improve detection?
GROUND: The combined use of free and total prostate-specific antigen (PSA) in early detection of prostate cancer has been controversial. This article systematically evaluates the discriminating capacity of a large number of combination tests. METHODS: Free and total PSA were analyzed in stored serum samples taken prior to diagnosis in 429 cases and 1,640 controls from the Physicians’ Health Study. We used a classification algorithm called logic regression to search for clinically useful tests combining total and percent free PSA and receiver operating characteristic analysis and compared these tests with those based on total and complexed PSA. Data were divided into training and test subsets. For robustness, we considered 35 test-train splits of the original data and computed receiver operating characteristic curves for each test data set. RESULTS: The average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve across test data sets was 0.74 for total PSA and 0.76 for the combinatio
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