If a patient does not have the disease, what is the probability of receiving a negative test result termed?

The probability of receiving a negative test result when the patient does not have the disease is called specificity. Specificity measures a diagnostic test's ability to correctly identify those without the disease, meaning it indicates the proportion of true negative results out of all individuals who are actually disease-free. A high specificity value means that the test is effective at ruling out the disease in healthy individuals.

In this context, sensitivity refers to how well a test can identify individuals with the disease, while the false positive rate is related to how often healthy individuals are incorrectly identified as having the disease. The true negative rate is another way of describing specificity, so while specificity and true negative rate can sometimes be used interchangeably, the term specificity is more commonly used in this context. Thus, specificity is the most accurate term to describe the probability of a negative test result in patients who do not have the disease.