Uncertainty in Measurement and Total Error: Tools for Coping with Diagnostic Uncertainty.

Laboratory medicine decreases diagnostic uncertainty, but is influenced by factors causing uncertainties. Error and uncertainty methods are commonly seen as incompatible in laboratory medicine. New versions of the Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement and International Vocabulary of Metrology will incorporate both uncertainty and error methods, which will assist collaboration between metrology and laboratories. Law of propagation of uncertainty and bayesian statistics are theoretically preferable to frequentist statistical methods in diagnostic medicine. However, frequentist statistics are better known and more widely practiced. Error and uncertainty methods should both be recognized as legitimate for calculating diagnostic uncertainty.