15283-B-Blokker

56 Chapter 4 MATERIALS AND METHODS For this systematic review the methods of Cochrane and PRISMA were used to the extent possible. 100,101 Database search Together with a biomedical information specialist we searched the Embase, Medline, Web of Science and Cochrane databases. We defined search terms for Embase and, from those, we derived search terms for the other databases. The search terms included the following elements: autopsy, imaging, cause of death and validation (see appendix 1). Case reports, studies on children and animal studies were excluded. The search was performed on the 16 th of July 2013 and, to see if any eligible articles had been published since the previous searches, repeated on the 1 st of April 2014 and on the 27 th of June 2014. The second and third time we also searched PubMed publisher and Google Scholar. EndNote software was used to collect all articles matching the search terms and to remove duplicate records of the same study. Article selection The following inclusion criteria were used for article selection: (1) original prospective studies comparing the diagnostic performance of non-invasive or minimally invasive autopsy methods to that of the reference standard (conventional autopsy, not necessarily including brain autopsy); (2) outcomes defined in agreement and/or sensitivity and/or specificity of cause of death and/or detected overall, major and/ or minor diagnostic findings; (3) the alternative autopsy methods covered at least an investigation of the deceased’s thorax and abdomen; (4) more than five adult cases Ƌ \HDUV RI DJH ZHUH VWXGLHG PRUH WKDQ ILYH SUHVXPHG QDWXUDO GHDWKV ZHUH studied. Two reviewers excluded the articles outside the scope of this review, based on the article titles and abstracts. Subsequently, they retrieved and evaluated the available full texts of the remaining articles and selected the articles that fully met the five inclusion criteria. A third reviewer was consulted in case the two reviewers disagreed on study eligibility. Data extraction and analysis Four reviewers were involved in the analyses, of which two were already for decades involved in research and scientific publication. Two reviewers independently performed the data extraction. Their interpretation was different with respect to one or two minor