Comparison of ThinPrep UroCyte and cytospin slide preparations for gastrointestinal specimens: Evaluation and retrospective performance review

The Morphological Analysis of Cells in the Peritoneal Washing Fluids of Patients with Gastric Cancer

The cytology of peritoneal washing fluids for gastric cancer is the most basic method for judging peritoneal micrometastasis. However, the clinical value of this method is not clear at present. A retrospective analysis was performed on 277 patients with pathologically proven and surgically treated gastric cancer. The peritoneal washing fluids were collected after opening the abdomen and before the operation, and were sent to the cytology laboratory for screening of occult cancer cells in the collected washing fluids. The number of cases diagnosed as cancer cells, reactive mesothelial cells, serosal balls, and traumatic mesothelial cells were 42, 18, 27, and 190, respectively. Typical adenocarcinoma cell nests were found in eight of 10 T4b samples, whereas 34 cases of cancer cells in T3 and T4a showed that these cell nests usually contained mesothelial cells, and the three-dimensional stereoscopic sense of the nests was not obvious. In the specific subcellular morphological changes of both reactive mesothelial cells and serosal balls, the changes of both the contour of nuclear membrane and the polarity of cell alignment were present only in stage T3 and T4a. The presence or absence of mesothelial cells in the nests of cancer cells and the changes of the contour of nuclear membrane and of the polarity of cell alignment in reactive mesothelial cells or serosal balls may help us to predict the depth of invasion of cancer cells.

Cell blocks in cytopathology: a review of preparative methods, utility in diagnosis and role in ancillary studies

The cell block (CB) is a routine procedure in cytopathology that has gained importance because of its pivotal role in diagnosis and ancillary studies. There is no precise review in the published literature that deals with the various methods of preparation of CB, its utility in diagnosis, immunocytochemistry (ICC) or molecular testing, and its drawbacks. An extensive literature search on CB in cytology using internet search engines was performed for this review employing the following keywords: cell block, cytoblock, cytology, cytopathology, methods, preparation, fixatives, diagnostic yield, ancillary and molecular studies. Ever since its introduction more than a century ago, the CB technique has undergone numerous modifications to improve the quality of the procedure; however, the overall principle remains the same in each method. CBs can be prepared from virtually all varieties of cytological samples. In today's era of personalized medicine, cytological specimens, including CBs, augment the utility of cytological samples in analysing the molecular alterations as effectively as surgical biopsies or resection specimens. With the availability of molecular targeted therapy for many cancers, a large number of recent studies have used cytological material or CBs for molecular characterization. The various techniques of CB preparation with different fixatives, their advantages and limitations, and issues of diagnostic yield are discussed in this review.

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.