I am trying to grasp the importance of some of the terms used to define the clin

Question

I am trying to grasp the importance of some of the terms used to define the clinical performance of screening tests. I understand that sensitivity is the likelyhood that the test result will be positive when a administered to a group of patients who has the disease. I also understand that specificity is the likelihood htat the test will be negative when given to patients who do not have the disease.     but do not really fully grasp the clinical importance of sensitivity and specificity.   Most specifically which one would be considered most useful in a clinical setting and why?

Explanation / Answer

It actually depends on type of trial.

However, generall specifity is more important and is paramount.

For example:

Many evaluations of the impact of False positives (FPs) and False Negatives (FNs) on empirical connectomes reflect that specificity is at least twice as important as sensitivity when estimating key properties of brain's neural networks, including topological measures of network clustering, network efficiency and network modularity. For the estimation of clustering coefficient the asymptotic analysis of small-world networks with idealized modular structure reveals that as the number of nodes grows, specificity becomes exactly twice as important as sensitivity. Also, for the estimation of network efficiency, the relative importance of specificity grows linearly with the number of nodes. The greater importance of specificity is due to FPs occurring more prevalently between network modules rather than within them. These spurious inter-modular connections have a dramatic impact on network topology. We argue that efforts to maximize the sensitivity of connectome reconstruction should be realigned with the need to map brain networks with high specificity.

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