Agreement on the Interpretations of Beta-Amyloid Images

• Activity Number: 372
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 11, 2015 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Biopharmaceutical Section
• Author(s): Jonathan Mahnken* and Alvin Beltramo
• Companies: The University of Kansas Medical Center and The University of Kansas Medical Center
• Keywords: Agreement ; Cohen's kappa

Abstract

New technologies for identifying subjects on a trajectory to develop Alzheimer's disease in a pre-symptomatic state have been developed, including those based on beta-amyloid imaging. However, properly interpreting these images requires special training, and so the level of agreement between independent readers of the same image needs to be better understood. It is also important to learn which factors drive disagreement between readers, both as they pertain to the characteristics of the reader, such as experience or type of clinical practice, and as they pertain to the patient, such as related clinical history. We compare methods for measuring agreement beyond the setting of two raters independently viewing a set of images to accommodate our experimental setting.