Interobserver Agreement Among Uveitis Experts on Uveitic Diagnoses: The Standardization of Uveitis Nomenclature Experience

Abstract

Purpose: To evaluate the interobserver agreement among uveitis experts on the diagnosis of the specific uveitic disease.

Design: Interobserver agreement analysis.

Methods: Five committees, each comprised of 9 individuals and working in parallel, reviewed cases from a preliminary database of 25 uveitic diseases, collected by disease, and voted independently online whether the case was the disease in question or not. The agreement statistic, κ, was calculated for the 36 pairwise comparisons for each disease, and a mean κ was calculated for each disease. After the independent online voting, committee consensus conference calls, using nominal group techniques, reviewed all cases not achieving supermajority agreement (>75%) on the diagnosis in the online voting to attempt to arrive at a supermajority agreement.

Results: A total of 5766 cases for the 25 diseases were evaluated. The overall mean κ for the entire project was 0.39, with disease-specific variation ranging from 0.23 to 0.79. After the formalized consensus conference calls to address cases that did not achieve supermajority agreement in the online voting, supermajority agreement overall was reached on approximately 99% of cases, with disease-specific variation ranging from 96% to 100%.

Conclusions: Agreement among uveitis experts on diagnosis is moderate at best but can be improved by discussion among them. These data suggest the need for validated and widely used classification criteria in the field of uveitis.