‘Insufficient’/‘Inadequate’/‘Non-Diagnostic’ Category of the WHO Reporting System for Lung Cytopathology, 2022: A Survey About Use in Practice
Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.
Statement of Eligibility for the Mina Desai Early Career Investigator Award: J.V.-G. (main author) is at the present a pathology resident in his fourth year of training in Hospital Clínico San Carlos (Madrid, Spain).
ABSTRACT
Introduction
The new ‘WHO Reporting System for Lung Cytopathology’ (2022) includes an ‘Insufficient’/‘Inadequate’/‘Non-diagnostic’ category. Although they recommend that each laboratory should choose one term to report this diagnostic category, they do not recommend one term over the others. Our aim was to evaluate the use of these three terms in pulmonary FNACs among Spanish pathologists.
Methods
A web-based survey among Spanish pathologists using Google Forms was performed. It included 14 yes/no and multiple-choice questions, the latter with an open-text option where it was possible to give a different answer from the ones given. Some questions inquired about their daily practice routine whilst others proposed different cytological examples with the intention of knowing how they would report those particular cases.
Results
Twenty-eight participants (18 cytopathologists, two general pathologists and seven residents) from 17 different Spanish hospitals completed the survey. Most of the respondents use more than one term of this diagnostic category, and there is a lack of reproducibility on the criteria to use one specific term.
Conclusion
There is a need to clearly define this category to reduce variability between pathologists.
Graphical Abstract
There are different approaches to report inadequate samples for diagnosis in respiratory cytological samples. No clear criteria have been published for such cases. We carried out a survey among Spanish pathologists to assess the reproducibility on the practical use of these terms on cytopathological reports. Insufficient/Inadequate/Non-diagnostic category of the WHO Reporting System for Lung Cytopathology (2022) may cause discrepancies among cytopathologists and cytotechnologists. A survey was carried out to evaluate the reproducibility in the practical use of this category among Spanish pathologists in pulmonary FNACs samples.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
Open Research
Data Availability Statement
Data are available upon request due to privacy/ethical restrictions. The data that support the findings of this study are available upon request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.
