TUESDAY, Jan. 26, 2016 (HealthDay News) -- Use of ultrasonography features can help identify the risk of malignancy for patients with an adnexal tumor, according to a study published online Jan. 18 in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.
Dirk Timmerman, M.D., Ph.D., from KU Leuven in Belgium, and colleagues developed and validated a model to predict the risk of malignancy in adnexal masses using the ultrasound features in the Simple Rules algorithm. Data were included for 4,848 patients with an adnexal tumor from 22 oncology centers, referral centers for ultrasonography, and general hospitals.
The researchers found that the malignancy rates were 43 and 17 percent, respectively, in oncology centers and other centers (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve on validation data, 0.917 and 0.916, respectively). Good calibration was seen in risk estimates. In the validation data set, 23 percent of patients had a very low estimated risk (<1 percent) and 48 percent had high estimated risk (≥30 percent). Sensitivity and specificity were 99.7 and 33.7 percent, respectively, for the 1 percent risk cut-off, with positive and negative predictive values (PPV and NPV) of 44.8 and 98.9 percent, respectively. Sensitivity and specificity were 89.0 and 84.7 percent, respectively, for the 30 percent risk cut-off, with PPV and NPV of 75.4 and 93.9 percent.
"Quantification of the risk of malignancy based on the Simple Rules has good diagnostic performance both in oncology centers and other centers," the authors write.
Abstract
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