Meta-analysis and structured literature review in radiology.

The overall goal of a systematic review or meta-analysis is to combine results of previous studies to arrive at summary conclusions about a body of research. In radiology, systematic reviews or meta-analyses can be used to calculate a summary estimate of effect size of a treatment that used imaging data to assess outcomes in observational or randomized controlled clinical trials, estimate the clinical effectiveness of an imaging-guided therapy procedure, evaluate the summary diagnostic accuracy of an imaging test, or synthesize results of economic evaluations that used imaging data. This article outlines the general concepts of structured literature reviews and discusses the approaches for conducting a meta-analysis in radiology, emphasizing the methods available for data synthesis and handling heterogeneity between and among studies.