A recent article by Grimes and Schultz [ 10] illustrates this point: "Although sensitivity and specificity are of interest to public-health policymakers, they are of little use to the clinician.
Those polled might have been astonished at the specificity of his interest, at the fineness of its grain.
Such specificity might be of interest to people like tennis players and javelin throwers.
RAD technologies and GBS can be adapted to poorly characterized genomes, but lack the specificity to regions of interest of exome sequencing.
Because cancer cell lines, passaged in vitro for years, may not reflect the biology of tumors in vivo, we will herein compare the specificity of TSPs of interest in cancer cell lines, primary breast cancer cells, as well as breast cancer tissue slices obtained using the Krumdieck Tissue Slicer.
To shed light on this issue, future researches should be commissioned to further evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of biomarkers of interest individually for their suitability to be used in the epidemiological studies.
CancerEST was developed as a user-friendly and intuitive tool to compute cancer marker/target potential as well as to obtain comprehensive expression profiles and information about the tissue specificity for genes of interest to biologists/clinicians.
ROC curves may be restricted to a range of sensitivities or specificities of clinical interest.
A more meaningful way to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy in such cases is to calculate the partial area under the curve (PAUC) i.e. the AUC over a selected range of threshold values that covers the specificities of clinical interest [ 75, 76].
