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specificity

— For tests, the proportion of patients without the condition of interest who have a negative test result

Synonyms:

true negative rate

Full explanation:

The specificity of a test is its ability to identify correctly people without the target condition. A test with high specificity will be negative for most of the people who do not have the condition, and have few false positive results.

Example:

For example, if 90 out of 100 patients in a study do not have cancer (based on the reference standard test), the specificity of that test for ruling out cancer is 90/100 or 90%.

See also:

sensitivity  ·  true negative test

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