Adjusting for non-ignorable verification bias in clinical studies for Alzheimer's disease.

A common problem for comparing the relative accuracy of two screening tests for Alzheimer's disease (AD) in a two-stage design study is verification bias. If the verification bias can be assumed to be ignorable, Zhou and Higgs have proposed a maximum likelihood approach to compare the relative accuracy of screening tests in a two-stage design study. However, if the verification mechanism also depends on the unobserved disease status, the ignorable assumption does not hold. In this paper, we discuss how to use a profile likelihood approach to compare the relative accuracy of two screening tests for AD without assuming the ignorable verification bias mechanism. Copyright 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.