I am pleased to accept an invitation from Professor Qihua Wang at Chinese Academy of Sciences to serve as a guest editor for a special issue on statistical methods for evaluation of diagnostic tests and biomarkers in SCIENCE CHINA Mathematics.
Diagnostic tests and biomarkers play an important role in medicine.They can be used not only as diagnostic tools for the diagnosis of a particular disease but also as companion tools for therapeutic purpose.Traditionally,diagnostic tests and biomarkers are used for the diagnosis of the presence or absence of a disease.In recent years,great efforts have been devoted to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of a test when the disease status is ordinal or time-dependent and to evaluate the predictive ability of a biomarker for predicting the response of a patient to a particular treatment.The second question is directly related to the latest development of medicine,called personalized medicine,a new medical model for tailoring a particular treatment to a particular patient,using patient's genetics and other information.