Estimating receiver operating characteristic curves with covariates when there is no perfect reference test for...

Paratuberculosis (Johne's disease) is a significant animal health problem. Evaluation of diagnostic tests for Johne's disease has been difficult due to lack of a gold standard test. In recent years, there has been interest in receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve estimation without any gold standard test. Typically, either Bayesian or maximum likelihood methods are proposed. Although these methods overcome the lack of a gold standard test in ROC curve estimation, little work has been done to incorporate covariates in the analysis. In this paper, we propose a method for estimation of ROC curves based on statistical models to adjust for covariate effects when the true disease states of test animals are unknown. The covariates may be correlated with the disease process or with the diagnostic testing procedure, or both. We propose a 2-part Bayesian model: first, a logistic regression model for disease prevalence is used to fit the covariates; second, a linear model is used to fit the covariates to the distribution of test scores. We used Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to compute the posterior estimates of the sensitivities and specificities that provide the groundwork for inference concerning the diagnostic procedure's accuracy. We applied the methodology to milk ELISA scores from several dairy-cow herds for the diagnostic testing of paratuberculosis. We found that both milk yield and its interaction with age had significant effects on the disease process whereas only milk yield was significant on the testing procedure.