Graphical User Interface Extension in R Commander for Evidence Based Medicine Indicators

Daniel Corneliu LEUCUȚA, Tudor CĂLINICI, Tudor DRUGAN, Dan ISTRATE, Andrei ACHIMAȘ
2014 Applied Medical Informatics  
Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) represents the use of the best latest evidence obtained by systematic search together with personal clinical experience and patient values. Clinical evidences are quantified by a number of indicators. R is a free and powerful environment for statistical computing and graphics, used mainly in command line interface. The aim of this work was to create an extension for R Commander to offer a graphical user interface to calculate the most used EBM indicators. Materials
more » ... and Methods: The extension was created in R and then tested in R 3.1.1 and R Commander 2.1-1. Results: The extension was successfully created and was named RcmdrPlugin.EBM, being available for download on Comprehensive R Archive Network servers. The extension creates a new menu called EBM, which offers an interface to calculate the following indicators with their confidence intervals: diagnosis (sensitivity, specificity, diagnostic accuracy, Youden's index, positive/negative likelihood ratio, positive/negative predictive value, number needed to diagnose), therapeutic (absolute risk reduction, relative risk reduction, odds ratio, relative risk, number needed to treat/harm), prognostic (attributable risk, relative risk, odds ratio). Conclusion: It is now easy to compute EBM indicators in R, with the graphical user interface extension of R Commander.
doaj:fbb43c31433a4c469e0e6af9ee4ac314 fatcat:lfgclkoyajghribtdl5ucxng54