Most current measures of the performance of a test, especially the indices of reliability, only tackle the variation of cases, and hence are not suitable for generalizing results across the population of readers.
For example, though we attempted to take into case-mix by taking into account co-morbidities and by looking at inequalities by procedure, it is very likely that this did not take all the variation of case-mix into account.
In Puerto Rico the sensitivity of such a "deviation bar chart" for indicating a dengue outbreak was 40% and the specificity was 90% [ 13] e) when the geographical units are too small, the variation of cases increases and may show wide oscillations.
The strengths of this study include the heterogeneity of the GPs who participated, and the systematic variation of cases, but there are also some limitations: First, the response rate was disappointing though typical for such GP studies.
Although rainfall in the region is seasonal [ 21], the temporal variation of cases of Shigella diarrhea did not fluctuate during the two rainfall stations, unlike the cases of diarrhea by other enteropathogens, which increased over the rainy season.
Using the intensity estimates, we calculated the spatial odds of LA-MRSA to compare the geographic variation of case-patients and controls across the study area.
For the main author, the bulk of the work was the identification of relevant future scenarios, as given in Table 3, setting up the variations of sub case studies, and producing questionnaires for the interviews.
The intragroup analysis also exploited the instrument of relative distances but in the sense of similarity evaluation through the variations of the case mean values around the group mean value.
Also, in this case, the variation of solution pH reflected the degree of mineralization in this study.
