Combining biomarker trajectories to improve diagnostic accuracy in prospective cohort studies with verification bias

Abstract

In this paper, we develop methods to combine multiple biomarker trajectories into a composite diagnostic marker using functional data analysis (FDA) to achieve better diagnostic accuracy in monitoring disease recurrence in the setting of a prospective cohort study. In such studies, the disease status is usually verified only for patients with a positive test result in any biomarker and is missing in patients with negative test results in all biomarkers. Thus, the test result will affect disease verification, which leads to verification bias if the analysis is restricted only to the verified cases. We treat verification bias as a missing data problem. Under both missing at random (MAR) and missing not at random (MNAR) assumptions, we derive the optimal classification rules using the Neyman-Pearson lemma based on the composite diagnostic marker. We estimate thresholds adjusted for verification bias to dichotomize patients as test positive or test negative, and we evaluate the diagnostic accuracy using the verification bias corrected area under the ROC curves (AUCs). We evaluate the performance and robustness of the FDA combination approach and assess the consistency of the approach through simulation studies. In addition, we perform a sensitivity analysis of the dependency between the verification process and disease status for the approach under the MNAR assumption. We apply the proposed method on data from the Religious Orders Study and from a non-small cell lung cancer trial.

Keywords: biomarker trajectory; functional data analysis; missing data mechanism; monitoring disease recurrence.