AUTOMATED SCREENING FOR QUALITY-CONTROL USING PAPNET - A STUDY OF 638NEGATIVE PAP SMEARS

To determine if the PAPNET screening system can be used for quality co ntrol to lower false-negative rates for PAP smears 638 manually screen ed, ''negative'' Pap smears were subjected retrospectively to the PAPN ET screening system. Twenty-nine of the smears came from 18 patients w ho subsequently had biopsy-proven high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesions (SIL). The remaining 609 negative smears were arbitrarily sele cted as controls. One hundred twenty-eight (128) of the retrospectivel y reviewed smears (20%) were selected by PAPNET for microscopic referr al because of potential abnormalities. Abnormalities were confirmed on 14 of these smears upon microscopic evaluation. Five of these 14 smea rs were from smears obtained from four of the 18 women with high-grade SIL. The incidence of manually screened false-negatives detected by P APNET rescreening was 14/638 or 2.2% for the entire patient population in this study and 5/29 or 17.24% for the targeted patients known to h ave subsequently developed high-grade lesions. The 2.2% decrease in th e false-negative rate in this experiment may be partly artificial as t his study group was seeded with false-negative cases at high risk for containing missed abnormalities. The implementation of the PAPNET syst em for quality control may lower false-negative rates for Pap smears.