It awakens interest that the frequency of carcinoma of the uterine cervix is the
highest among the carcinomas among the Korean women, although 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 seventy 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 negativity, 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 (57.0%), 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%.
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