Sensitivity and specificity are statistical measures of the performance of a binary classification test, also known in statistics as classification function:

• Sensitivity (also called the true positive rate, or the recall in some fields) measures the proportion of positives that are correctly identified as such (e.g., the percentage of sick people who are correctly identified as having the condition).
• Specificity (also called the true negative rate) measures the proportion of negatives that are correctly identified as such (e.g., the percentage of healthy people who are correctly identified as not having the condition).

Thus sensitivity quantifies the avoiding of false negatives, as specificity does for false positives.