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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2014 May 20.
Published in final edited form as: Stat Med. 2012 Sep 13;32(11):1865–1876. doi: 10.1002/sim.5601

Figure 3. Net benefit against plotted against threshold probabilityfor a molecular marker of prostate cancer compared to an invasive diagnostic test.

Figure 3

Grey line: biopsy all men. Thin black line: biopsy no men. Dashed line: biopsy if HK test positive. Thick black line: biopsy if TRUS test positive, assuming no harm of TRUS (left panel); a physician would do not more than 10 TRUS to find one cancer (center panel); a physician would do no more than 50 TRUS to find one cancer (right panel). TRUS is of some benefit (left panel) unless one takes into account harm: even under the very liberal assumption that a physician would conduct 50 TRUS to find one cancer (right panel), TRUS has highest net benefit for no threshold probability.