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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2016 Oct 1.
Published in final edited form as: Surg Clin North Am. 2015 Jun 20;95(5):953–966. doi: 10.1016/j.suc.2015.05.009

Table 1.

Common performance characteristics of screening tests

Performance
Characteristic		 Definition
Sensitivity Proportion of subjects with cancer who test positive
Specificity Proportion of subjects without cancer who test negative
Receiver-Operating Characteristic (ROC) Curve Curve of Sensitivity at varying levels of 1-Specificity
Area under the ROC Curve (AUC) Area below the ROC curve; 1=perfect prediction, 0.5=no predictive ability
Positive Predictive Value (PPV) Proportion of subjects who test positive that have cancer
Negative Predictive Value (NPV) Proportion of subjects who test negative that do not have cancer