Three-Way Mixed Effect ANOVA to Estimate MRMC Limits of Agreement

When evaluating the clinical performance of a medical imaging device, a multi-reader multi-case (MRMC) analysis is usually applied to account for both case and reader variability. For a clinical task that equates to a quantitative measurement, an agreement analysis such as a limits of agreement (LOA) method can be used to compare different measurement methods. In this work, we introduce four types of comparisons; these types differ depending on whether the measurements are within or between readers and within or between modalities. A three-way mixed effect ANOVA model is applied to estimate the variances of individual differences, which is an essential step for estimating LOA. To verify the estimates of LOA, we propose a hierarchical model to simulate quantitative MRMC data. Two simulation studies were conducted to validate both the simulation and the LOA variance estimates. From the simulation results, we can conclude that our estimate of variance is unbiased, and the uncertainty of the estimation drops as the number of readers and cases increases and rises as the value of true variance increases.