Table 1. Comparison of Meta-Analysis of Therapeutic/Interventional Studies and Diagnostic Test Accuracy Studies.

	Therapeutic/Interventional Study	Diagnostic Test Accuracy Study
Number of outcome variables	Single outcome	Pair of outcomes, sensitivity and specificity, which generally inversely correlated
Analysis of heterogeneity between studies	Chi-square test (Cochrane Q statistic): p < 0.1 generally indicates significant heterogeneity Higgins' I2 statistic: rough guide to interpretation is as follows (10);  0% to 25%, might not be important  25% to 50%, may represent low heterogeneity  50% to 75%, may represent moderate heterogeneity  75% to 100%, high heterogeneity	Cochrane Q or Higgins' I2 statistics alone may not be informative as they do not consider threshold effect Visual evaluation of coupled forest plot or SROC plot to find threshold effect Spearman correlation analysis between sensitivity and false positive rate: r ≥ 0.6 generally indicates considerable threshold effect (12)
Meta-analytic summary	Summary point and its 95% CI obtained with  Fixed-effects model: when study heterogeneity does not exist  Random-effects model: when existence of study heterogeneity is suspected	Summary point  Summary sensitivity and specificity and their 95% CIs obtained with bivariate model: recommended Summary plot (SROC curve)  Moses-Littenberg model: not recommended  HSROC curve: recommended

CI = confidence interval, HSROC = hierarchical summary receiver operating characteristic, SROC = summary receiver operating characteristic