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

Abstract

Background: 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 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.