false negative

noun

plural false negatives

: a person or test result that is incorrectly classified as negative (as for the presence of a health condition) because of imperfect testing methods or procedures

A false negative, in medical lingo, is a screening test that says "no cancer" when all the while a cancer is, in fact, growing undetected.

—Robin Marantz Henig

—often hyphenated when used before another noun

a false-negative rate of 5%

… only 4 of 31 tears found on arthroscopic evaluation were missed prospectively by MRI, and two of these false-negative results were found retrospectively to be due to observer error rather than failure of the MRI system to image the tear.

—Peter D. Franklin et al.

compare false positive

Examples of false negative in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Are errors more likely to result in false positives or false negatives? —Robert Pearl, Forbes, 30 Sep. 2024

Since antigen options have a higher risk of producing a false negative result, especially early during an infection, the agency says people should continue to repeat their testing over several days after their first negative test. —Alexander Tin, CBS News, 26 Sep. 2024

Still, researchers like Weyand call for raising the thresholds to avoid false negative results that would keep people with iron deficiency from being diagnosed and treated. —Lourdes Medrano, NPR, 15 Sep. 2024

Vendors are not required, for instance, to submit confusion matrices, a table that shows how performance varies—on metrics such as false positive and false negative rates—across different patient groups, although Scarlet does currently ask vendors to submit these metrics. —Jeremy Kahn, Fortune, 17 Sep. 2019

Word History

First Known Use

1916, in the meaning defined above

Medical Definition

false negative

noun

: a person or test result that is incorrectly classified as negative (as for the presence of a health condition) because of imperfect testing methods or procedures

"The addition of the lateral chest radiograph to the frontal view did not improve the diagnostic accuracy of pediatric emergency physicians," he [Dr. Lynch] concluded, "and it may also increase the percentage of false negatives."

—Terry Murray, Medical Post

Previous studies of sentinel nodes have revealed some false negatives (i.e., women with a normal sentinel node who nonetheless had other axillary node metastases revealed on total dissection).

—Bill Zepf, American Family Physician

… testing for heterophile antibodies was negative, but false negative results are well recognized.

—Lindley A. Barbee et al., The New England Journal of Medicine

—often hyphenated when used before another noun

false-negative results

… any false-negative smears would again underestimate the prevalence of abnormal test results.

—Jeanne Mandelblatt et al., The Journal of the American Medical Association

compare false positive