A Matlab Tool to Support Systematic Literature Review with Meta-Analysis

Health Technology Assessment (HTA) is a scientific decision-making structured process aiming to support political decisions in healthcare. HTA bases on the best available scientific evidence, which according to evidence-based medicine is given by systematic literature review with meta-analysis. After introducing the key steps of a meta-analysis, this paper describes a MATLAB® tool developed to support biomedical engineers (BME) in performing meta-analyses. The tool was validated comparing its results with a freely available tool for meta-analysis, proving that its results were correct at the third decimal. Being developed in MATLAB®, this tool should result more user-friendly for engineers than other tools currently available and it will be easily integrated with the various tools supporting other phases of an HTA study.