NMADTA: An R package for network meta-analysis of multiple diagnostic tests

Meta-analysis is a widely used statistical tool for estimating the diagnostic accuracy of tests across multiple studies. Existing methods and available R packages primarily focus on a single diagnostic test, typically under the assumption that all studies include a gold standard. Greater efficiency can be achieved by modeling multiple diagnostic tests together and drawing on studies with or without a gold standard reference test across diverse designs. To address this challenge, recent work has extended both the Bayesian hierarchical model and the Bayesian hierarchical summary receiver operating characteristic model to the framework of network meta-analysis of diagnostic tests, enabling simultaneous comparison of multiple tests when some data are missing. Despite the importance of these methods, their computational complexity has limited their broad application. This article introduces NMADTA , an R package that implements these models with user-friendly functions. The package allows researchers to evaluate the accuracy of multiple diagnostic tests simultaneously and provides comprehensive graphical displays of the results.