CIN: cervical intraepithelial neoplasia
*217 cases were categorized as <CIN2 based on clinical/colposcopic criteria without biopsy.
3.2 Sample’s adequacy
All hrHPV-positive samples were considered valid. 5.7% (28/490) cervical, 3.3% (16/490) vaginal and 3.9% (19/490) FVU hrHPV-negative specimens were inadequate. Most cervical (23/28) and FVU (12/19) samples were invalid because of a low cellularity, while only 3 vaginal samples showed cellularity below the cut-off. Invalidity in this group of samples was mainly related to extraction efficiency (13/16). As shown in Table 2, the cellularity of vaginal self-collected specimens (transferred into 5 ml of eNat was demonstrated to be more than 10-fold higher than that of cervical (transferred into 20 ml PreservCyt) and FVU samples.
Table 2: Median values of cellularity (cells/reaction) across different types of samples.