The prevention of alcohol problems and the effective treatment of afflicted individuals has enormous potential for reducing illness and death and for improving the quality of life for millions of Americans. NIAAA, since its establishment in 1970, has been committed to the development and dissemination of knowledge that can be used to improve the treatment and prevention of alcohol abuse and alcoholism. NIAAA's research portfolio encompasses a wide range of research in the biomedical and behavioral sciences. In support of its goals, NIAAA maintains intramural research facilities and promotes a wide range of extramural research efforts through grants, contracts, and cooperative agreements.Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was developed in statistical decision theory and later applied to signal detection theory. Although signal detection theory was applied initially to problems in radar, ROC analysis was successfully used in a large variety of studies in psychology and psychophysics by the mid-1960s. Since that time, ROC analysis has increasingly been applied to medical decision making, largely in radiology, but its full potential in epidemiology has yet to be realized.ROC analysis produces curves that graphically represent sensitivity and specificity, calculated at all possible threshold values. An important aspect of ROC analysis is that it provides a common quantitative index describing the area under an ROC curve. This index summarizes the tradeoffs between sensitivity and specificity at each point along the ROC curve. The need for this overall summary measure of test performance in epidemiology cannot be overstated.At present, ROC models have been developed using both parametric and nonparametric methods and can be used with categorical or quantitative data. Methodologies are available that allow investigators to account for the effects of covariates on test performance, and statistical tests have been developed for the comparison of areas under two ROC curves. This project is motivated by the need for updated software and graphical user interface (GUI) for most common ROC analyses relevant to the fields of alcohol, drug, and psychiatric epidemiology.
