RIMeta: An R Shiny Tool for Estimating the Reference Interval from a Meta-Analysis.

A reference interval, or an interval in which a pre-specified proportion of measurements from a healthy population are expected to fall, is used to determine whether a person's measurement is typical of a healthy individual. For a specific biomarker, multiple published studies may provide data collected from healthy participants. A reference interval estimated by combining the data across these studies is typically more generalizable than a reference interval based on a single study. Methods for estimating reference intervals from random effects meta-analysis and fixed effects meta-analysis have been recently proposed and implemented using R software. We present an R Shiny tool, RIMeta, implementing these methods, which allows users not proficient in R to estimate a reference interval from a meta-analysis using aggregate data (mean, standard deviation, and sample size) from each study. RIMeta provides users a convenient way to estimate a reference interval from a meta-analysis and to generate the reference interval plot to visualize the results. The use of this web-based R Shiny tool does not require the installation of R or any background knowledge of programming. We explain all functions of the R Shiny tool and illustrate how to use it with a real data example. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.