When you consider the results of a particular test in two populations, one population with a disease, the other population without the disease, you will rarely observe a perfect separation between the two groups. ROC curves can also be used to compare the diagnostic performance of two or more laboratory or diagnostic tests (Griner et al., 1981). The diagnostic performance of a test, or the accuracy of a test to discriminate diseased cases from normal cases is evaluated using Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve analysis (Metz, 1978 Zweig & Campbell, 1993). The ROC curve is a fundamental tool for diagnostic test evaluation. MedCalc creates a complete sensitivity/specificity report. The Area Under the ROC curve (AUC) is a measure of how well a parameter can distinguish between two diagnostic groups (diseased/normal). Each point on the ROC curve represents a sensitivity/specificity pair corresponding to a particular decision threshold.

A ROC curve is a plot of the true positive rate (Sensitivity) in function of the false positive rate (100-Specificity) for different cut-off points of a parameter.

Elisa curve on graphpad prism