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It is widely recommended that any developed-diagnostic or prognostic-prediction model is externally validated in terms of its predictive performance measured by calibration and discrimination. When multiple validations have been performed, a systematic review followed by a formal meta-analysis helps to summarize overall performance across multiple settings, and reveals under which circumstances the model performs suboptimal (alternative poorer) and may need adjustment. We discuss how to undertake meta-analysis of the performance of prediction models with either a binary or a time-to-event outcome. We address how to deal with incomplete availability of study-specific results (performance estimates and their precision), and how to produce summary estimates of the c-statistic, the observed:expected ratio and the calibration slope. Furthermore, we discuss the implementation of frequentist and Bayesian meta-analysis methods, and propose novel empirically-based prior distributions to improve estimation of between-study heterogeneity in small samples. Finally, we illustrate all methods using two examples: meta-analysis of the predictive performance of EuroSCORE II and of the Framingham Risk Score. All examples and meta-analysis models have been implemented in our newly developed R package "metamisc".

Original publication

DOI

10.1177/0962280218785504

Type

Journal article

Journal

Stat methods med res

Publication Date

09/2019

Volume

28

Pages

2768 - 2786

Keywords

Meta-analysis, aggregate data, calibration, discrimination, evidence synthesis, prediction, prognosis, systematic review, validation, Bayes Theorem, Calibration, Humans, Meta-Analysis as Topic, Models, Statistical, Prognosis, Research Design, Risk Assessment, Systematic Reviews as Topic