Figure 1.
Flow of included studies.
Table 1.
Characteristics of all papers included in the review, ordered by year.
Figure 2.
QUADAS results.
Figure 3.
Overview of all 2 by 2 tables with forest plot (TP = true positives; FP = false positives; FN = false negatives; TN = true negatives; CSF = cerebrospinal fluid; PCR = polymerase chain reaction; NASBA = nucleic acid sequence based amplification; OC = oligochromatography; RT = real-time). Capital A or B refers to different set of data from the same paper. These sets may differ in clinical specimen studied, target gene or amplification technology applied.
Figure 4.
Summary ROC plot for PCR and PCR-OC. Shows summary estimate (black dot), summary curve and confidence ellipse around the summary estimate. Width of the symbols reflects the number of non-diseased patients; height of the symbol reflects the number of diseased patients.
Table 2.
Meta-analysis for PCR tests completed on blood, including subgroup analyses.