Point-of-care N-terminal pro B-type natriuretic peptide assay to screen apparently healthy cats for cardiac disease in general practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Point-of-care (POC) N-terminal pro B-type natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) ELISA test has been evaluated for screening cats for cardiac disease in the referral veterinary setting but less is known about its use in general practice (GP). OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the diagnostic utility of a POC NT-proBNP ELISA in cats seen in GPs. ANIMALS: Two hundred and seventeen apparently healthy cats from 21 GPs. METHODS: This was a prospective, cross-sectional study. Cardiac auscultation and POC NT-proBNP ELISA were done by veterinarians at their GPs. After enrollment at GPs, cats were sent to a cardiology referral hospital for cardiac auscultation and echocardiographic diagnosis. Results were interpreted based on whether cats had normal or abnormal echocardiographic findings. RESULTS: Point-of-care NT-proBNP ELISA results differentiated cats in the abnormal group from those in the normal group with a sensitivity of 43%, specificity of 96%. In cats with a heart murmur at GPs, POC NT-proBNP ELISA results differentiated cats in the abnormal group from those in the normal group with a sensitivity of 71% and a specificity of 92%. CONCLUSION AND CLINICAL IMPORTANCE: In apparently healthy cats in GPs, positive POC NT-proBNP results are associated with heart disease, warranting an echocardiogram, but negative results do not reliably exclude heart disease. These results suggest POC NT-proBNP is not an effective screening test for apparently healthy cats in GPs, although its performance is improved if it is used only in cats that have a heart murmur.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".