Computer-assisted Papanicolaou imaging

Reliability of reporting the presence of transformation zone material in Papanicolaou smears using an automated screening system

OBJECTIVE

This study was conducted to evaluate the reliability of using an interactive automated screening system (IAS) to determine the presence of endocervical and/or metaplastic cells (transformation zone material; TZM) in liquid-based cytology (LBC) Papanicolaou (Pap) smear slides.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

A series of LBC Pap smears was manually screened to determine the presence or absence of TZM. The results were compared to those obtained through IAS.

RESULTS

ThinPrep^® Imaging System (Imager)-assisted screening indicated that 22.4% of the slides did not contain TZM in cases in which previous manual screening revealed that 100% of the slides did contain TZM.

CONCLUSION

The reliability of determining TZM through IAS is limited. Manual screening of the slides appears to be necessary to report the presence of TZM accurately.

Authors attain comparable or slightly higher rates of citation publishing in an open access journal (CytoJournal) compared to traditional cytopathology journals - A five year (2007-2011) experience

BACKGROUND

The era of Open Access (OA) publication, a platform which serves to better disseminate scientific knowledge, is upon us, as more OA journals are in existence than ever before. The idea that peer-reviewed OA publication leads to higher rates of citation has been put forth and shown to be true in several publications. This is a significant benefit to authors and is in addition to another relatively less obvious but highly critical component of the OA charter, i.e. retention of the copyright by the authors in the public domain. In this study, we analyzed the citation rates of OA and traditional non-OA publications specifically for authors in the field of cytopathology.

DESIGN

We compared the citation patterns for authors who had published in both OA and traditional non-OA peer-reviewed, scientific, cytopathology journals. Citations in an OA publication (CytoJournal) were analyzed comparatively with traditional non-OA cytopathology journals (Acta Cytologica, Cancer Cytopathology, Cytopathology, and Diagnostic Cytopathology) using the data from web of science citation analysis site (based on which the impact factors (IF) are calculated). After comparing citations per publication, as well as a time adjusted citation quotient (which takes into account the time since publication), we also analyzed the statistics after excluding the data for meeting abstracts.

RESULTS

Total 28 authors published 314 publications as articles and meeting abstracts (25 authors after excluding the abstracts). The rate of citation and time adjusted citation quotient were higher for OA in the group where abstracts were included (P < 0.05 for both). The rates were also slightly higher for OA than non-OA when the meeting abstracts were excluded, but the difference was statistically insignificant (P = 0.57 and P = 0.45).

CONCLUSION

We observed that for the same author, the publications in the OA journal attained a higher rate of citation than the publications in the traditional non-OA journals in the field of cytopathology over a 5 year period (2007-2011). However, this increase was statistically insignificant if the meeting abstracts were excluded from the analysis. Overall, the rates of citation for OA and non-OA were slightly higher to comparable.