Assessing equivalence of two assays using sensitivity and specificity

The equivalence of two assays is determined using the sensitivity and specificity relative to a gold standard. The equivalence-testing criterion is based on a misclassification rate proposed by Burdick et al. (2005) and the intersection-union test (IUT) method proposed by Berger (1982). Using a variance components model and IUT methods, we construct bounds for the sensitivity and specificity relative to the gold standard assay based on generalized confidence intervals. We conduct a simulation study to assess whether the bounds maintain the stated test size. We present a computational example to demonstrate the method described in the paper.