This poster is published under an
open license. Please read the
disclaimer for further details.
Keywords:
Professional issues, Management, Genital / Reproductive system male, MR, Audit and standards, Diagnostic procedure, Health policy and practice, Quality assurance
Authors:
A. G. Wibmer, H. A. Vargas, T. Atkinson, D. M. Panicek, C. Moskowitz, J. Zheng, J. A. Eastham, H. Hricak; New York City, NY/US
DOI:
10.1594/ecr2014/C-0263
Aims and objectives
Expressing levels of diagnostic certainty is an integral component of day-to-day clinical practice for radiologists.
At the extreme ends of the spectrum of diagnostic certainty are the absolute presence (e.g.
“displaced fracture of the right femoral neck”) and the absolute absence (e.g.
“no pneumothorax”) of a specific finding.
In between these extremes lie a spectrum of possibilities of diagnostic certainty that can be expressed using a wide variety of terms.
Traditionally,
the phrasing of the level of diagnostic certainty is left to the discretion of the reporting radiologist and the interpretation of the report is left to the referring physician.
This approach has been shown to lead to potential misunderstandings (1-2)
At Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center,
we developed a standardized lexicon to express the radiologist’s level of certainty regarding a given diagnostic imaging finding.
When reading the report,
the referring physician can undoubtedly understand the meaning of these phrases and reliably incorporate this level of certainty into their decision-making process.
The aim of this study was to evaluate the usefulness and accuracy of this lexicon of diagnostic certainty for reporting the presence of extracapsular tumor extension (ECE) on pre-prostatectomy prostate MRI.