title: Effectiveness of rapid prescreening and 10% rescreening in liquid-based Papanicolaou testing.
abstract: Although rapid prescreening (RPS) has been shown to be an effective quality control procedure for detecting false-negative conventional Papanicolaou (Pap) tests, RPS has not been widely implemented in the United States. In our laboratory, cytotechnologists performed RPS in 3,567 liquid-based Pap tests: 1,911 SurePath (BD Diagnostics-TriPath, Burlington, NC) preparations that were manually screened and 1,656 ThinPrep Pap tests (Hologic, Bedford, MA) that were imaged using the ThinPrep Imaging System (Hologic). We compared the sensitivity of RPS, 10% rescreening (R-10%), and routine screening (RS). In contrast with previously published findings, we found that RS + RPS did not improve screening sensitivity compared with RS + R-10%. These results support the following hypotheses: (1) Higher baseline RS sensitivity as a result of Pap test diagnoses standardization implemented for quality improvement purposes decreases the performance impact of RPS. (2) R-10% and RPS quality assurance methods detect diagnostic failures caused by different types of cognitive errors.
authors.affiliation: Department of Pathology, University of Colorado Denver, Aurora, CO 80045, USA.
authors.forename: Heather S
authors.initials: HS
authors.lastname: Currens
authors.forename: Katharine
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Nejkauf
authors.forename: Lynn
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Wagner
authors.forename: Stephen S
authors.initials: SS
authors.lastname: Raab
mesh_terms: D005188:False Negative Reactions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008403:Mass Screening / Q000379:methods*; D065006:Papanicolaou Test; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D002583:Uterine Cervical Neoplasms / Q000175:diagnosis*; D014626:Vaginal Smears / Q000379:methods*