Systematic reviews and meta-analyses form a secondary research methodology that identifies and critically appraises all the relevant studies that are available in various databases to answer a particular research question in an unbiased and systematic manner. In the pyramid of level of evidence, the systematic review of high-quality studies is placed at the highest hierarchy position. Meta-analysis is the statistical analysis of the systematic review that provides pooled estimates of the effect of individual studies in the systematic review, but sometimes a meta-analysis may not always be possible. This article elaborates the key steps to conduct a high-quality systematic review and meta-analysis in the field of radiology and intervention radiology, which will help the readers to design and conduct them along with to understand and interpret this secondary research.
Keywords: evidence-based medicine; meta-analysis; pooled estimates; systematic review.
Indian Radiological Association. This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ).