Ellis, Haylee MareeMulder, ChristiaanValverde, EmilioPoling, AlanEdwards, Timothy L.2017-05-0520172017-05-052017Ellis, H. M., Mulder, C., Valverde, E., Poling, A., & Edwards, T. L. (2017). Reproducibility of African giant pouched rats detecting Mycobacterium tuberculosis. BMC Infectious Diseases, 17(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12879-017-2347-3https://hdl.handle.net/10289/11030Background: African pouched rats sniffing sputum samples provided by local clinics have significantly increased tuberculosis case findings in Tanzania and Mozambique. The objective of this study was to determine the reproducibility of rat results. Methods: Over an 18-month period 11,869 samples were examined by the rats. Intra-rater reliability was assessed through Yule’s Q. Inter-rater reliability was assessed with Krippendorff’s alpha. Results: Intra-rater reliability was high, with a mean Yule’s Q of 0.9. Inter-rater agreement was fair, with Krippendorf’s alpha ranging from 0.15 to 0.45. Both Intra- and Inter-rater reliability was independent of the sex of the animals, but they were positively correlated with age. Both intra- and inter-rater agreement was lowest for samples designated as smear-negative by the clinics. Conclusion: Overall, the reproducibility of tuberculosis detection rat results was fair and diagnostic results were therefore independent of the rats used.application/pdfen© The Author(s). 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.TuberculosisDiagnosisReproducibilityDetection ratsInter-rater reliabilityIntra-rater reliabilityJournal Article10.1186/s12879-017-2347-31471-2334