Currently, there is global interest in deriving new promising cancer biomarkers that could complement or substitute the conventional ones. Clinical decisions can often be based on the cutoff that corresponds to the maximized Youden index when maximum accuracy drives decisions. When more than one classification criteria are measured within the same individuals, correlated measurements arise. In this work, we propose hypothesis tests and confidence intervals for the comparison of two correlated receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves in terms of their corresponding maximized Youden indices. We explore delta-based techniques under parametric assumptions, or power transformations. Nonparametric kernel-based methods are also examined. We evaluate our approaches through simulations and illustrate them using data from a metabolomic study referring to the detection of pancreatic cancer.

中文翻译：

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从相关生物标志物获得的两个最大化约登指数之间差异的统计推断

目前，全球都对开发新的、有前景的癌症生物标志物感兴趣，以补充或替代传统的癌症生物标志物。当最大准确性驱动决策时，临床决策通常可以基于与最大化约登指数相对应的截止值。当在同一个体中测量多个分类标准时，就会出现相关测量。在这项工作中，我们提出假设检验和置信区间，以根据相应的最大化约登指数来比较两条相关的接收者操作特征（ROC）曲线。我们在参数假设或幂变换下探索基于增量的技术。还检查了基于非参数核的方法。我们通过模拟评估我们的方法，并使用来自胰腺癌检测的代谢组学研究的数据来说明它们。