Comparison of Manual Liquid Based Cytology and Conventional Pap Smear in Cervical Cancer Screening

摘要

Introduction: Pap smear is a screening procedure to detect precancerous lesions to prevent subsequent invasive cervical cancer. Manual Liquid Based Cytology (MLBC) has been developed as an alternative to Conventional Pap Smear (CPS) as it is said to increase the rate of detection of precancerous lesions as it reduces the screening time, the artefacts, giving a clean background on the smear and providing residual cellular material for molecular testing (HPV DNA).Aim: To compare the diagnostic performance of manual liquid based cytology and conventional Pap smear in cervical cancer screening.Materials and Methods: This is a prospective study, done for a period of 2 months, in 97 women with CPS and MLBC and compared with the gold standard- histopathology. The smears were stained by Rapid Pap stain and reported using Bethesda system of reporting.Results: MLBC showed a higher satisfactory rate of 88.7% and CPS 86.6%. MLBC showed clean background in 34% while CPS only in 8%. The sensitivity and specificity of CPS was 33.33% and 95.65%. The sensitivity and specificity of MLBC was 22.22% and 95.65%. The p-value was not significant (>0.05).Conclusion: MLBC was better than CPS only with respect to specimen adequacy and clean background. Since, LBC is new technique, training in sample collection, processing and analyzing the MLBC slides may improve the efficiency of this method in low resource setting.