[Evaluation of diagnostic methods. Application to the diagnosis of benign or malignant colonic tumours (author's transl)]

The evaluation of diagnostic methods has become a necessity in clinical practice in order to select those techniques with the best possible cost-effectiveness ratio. Using simple informational indices such as sensitivity or specificity, it is possible to analyse the literature devoted to diagnostic methods in a given disease. This method is here applied to the problem of the detection of colonic tumours, benign or malignant, and gives an estimation of the informational value of occult blood examinations, rectosigmoidoscopy, simple barium enema, double contrast barium enema and colonoscopy.