Study characteristics
Our research revealed 11 studies fulfilling these inclusion criteria9-19, producing a pooled data set of 653 patients of whom 294 underwent MI and 359 underwent MS cardiac tumor excision (table 3) (figure 1). There was 100% concordance between reviewers equating to a Cohen’s kappa coefficient of κ = 1. The mean sample size was 59.3 patients (range, 5–250 patients) and the mean follow-up duration was 33.3 months (range, 3.7­–56 months). All included studies were retrospective; six studies10-14, 16 included two homogeneous populations and were considered high-quality (median equal or above 10, Table 2); 601 cardiac masses were myxomas (92%) with most prevalent location at the level of the left atrium (table 2).