A Novel Statistical Method for Transference of Pediatric Reference Intervals Using Hospital-Based Data

• Activity Number: 46
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 4, 2013 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Biometrics Section
• Author(s): Caitlin Daly*+ and Jemila Hamid and Vijay Grey and Xiaofeng Liu and Angela Rutledge and Kristin Hauff
• Companies: McMaster University and McMaster University and McMaster University and McMaster University and McMaster University and McMaster University
• Keywords: pediatric ; reference intervals ; mixture distributions ; hospital based data

Abstract

Clinical interpretation of laboratory tests requires comparison of the test results with established reference intervals (RIs). Establishing or verifying pediatric RIs for use in laboratories is difficult due to the challenge of collecting healthy samples. We propose a novel statistical method that allows the use of hospital-based data to determine the transferability of established RIs. Traditional transference may be conducted after accounting for the "healthy" proportion of hospital data using the Hoffman approach or Gaussian mixture distributions. Extensive simulations across various scenarios illustrate comparable results between traditional transference using data from healthy populations and the proposed method with mixture distributions.