THE CONCEPT OF SENSITIVITY AND SPECIFICITY IN RELATION TO TWO TYPES OF ERRORS AND ITS APPLICATION IN MEDICAL RESEARCH

Sensitivity and specificity are two terms widely used in Medical research and are thestatistical measures of performance of a binary classification test. In clinical research thesensitivity of a medical test is the probability of its giving a ‘positive’ result when the patient isindeed positive and specificity is the probability of getting ‘negative’ result when the patient isindeed negative. Wrongly identify a healthy person as sick and a sick person as healthy is closelyrelated to the concept of type I and type II errors of testing hypothesis. It was observed that thesensitivity of a test is equal to power of test in hypothesis testing.