An Evaluation of Results of Cytological Diagnosis for the Uterine Cervical Lesions

Choi, Chan; Cho, Sung Hee; Juhng, Sang Woo; Cho, Kyu Hyuk

Abstract

It awakens interest that the frequency of carcinoma of the uterine cervix is the highest among the carcinomas among the Korean women, althouth it is not so high among Westerns. It is admitted that the exfolicative cytologic technique is useful not only as a screening test for early detection of cervical cancer and its precursor lesions but also as a tool for follow-up, because it is accurate, economical, and easy to perform. But it remains to be solved that the false negativity of the cytologic diagnosis is relatively high. Five hundred and sevently two cases of cytology specimens, confirmed by either colposcopic biopsy or cone biopsy, were studied among 15,844 cases which were submitted to the Department of Pathology, Chonnam University Hospital between October of 1982 and August of 1986. The results obtained were as follows. 1) The accuracy of the cytologic diagnosis was 69.9%, the false nagativity, 19.4% and the false positivity, 6.6%. 2) Among the causes of discrepancies between cytologic diagnosis and histologic diagnosis, error in cytology reading was the most frequent (57%), error in cell collection was the second frequent (43.7%), and error in biopsy location was the least frequent (5.3%). 3) Among the 38 cases of false positive diagnosis, the percentage of error in cytology reading was 82.3%, and that of error in biopsy location was 20.7%. Among the 105 cases of false negative diagnosis, the percentage of error in cytology reading was 50.5%, and the percentage of error in cell collection was 56.6%.