Specificity and Sensitivity

In the help pages for Oasys, and elsewhere on this website, we talk about specificity and  sensitivity quite a lot.

These terms relate to how good a test is, on this website they generally refer to how good a test is at diagnosing occupational asthma.

Specificity is the percentage of patients that have no problems with occupational asthma that are correctly identified as not having a problem. So a specificty of 92% means that 8% of patients without occupational asthma are falsely identified as having occupational asthma.

Sensitivity is the percentage of patients with occupational asthma that are correctly identified as having occupational asthma. So a sensitivity of 77% means that 23% of people with occupational asthma will not be identified using the test.

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