what is considered an unacceptable error rate in pathology? is like 5-10%?
what is considered an unacceptable error rate?
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In what context? This has been studied in pap smears and to a lesser extent in urine cytology. But in terms of tissue core biopsies or resections, for example, any errors are often unacceptable. Bear in mind though, that many biopsies are tiny, full of artifacts, or otherwise indequate so while they may be diagnostic to some pathologists they will not be for others. There are also biopsies which simply miss the lesion - that's a false negative but it's not the pathologist's fault. So it is hard to define the terms. That is why when you ask about an acceptable error rate you have to clearly define what you are looking for. Many clinical path tests are based on ranges of normal or abnormal, and there will obviously be cases where presence of disease does not correlate with a lab test outside of the "normal" reference range. Is that an error or just a false negative?
If you want a simple answer to your question and don't want to think about it any harder, however, the answer is 17.
If you want a simple answer to your question and don't want to think about it any harder, however, the answer is 17.
Calling something malignant benign or vice versa, unacceptable 100% of the time.
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5-10% would be way too high of an error rate. It really depends on what you define as an "error". Each department has its own QA system for attendings which generally consists of some sort of scoring system. Making a mistake that harms a patient is very serious (e.g. calling a margin negative on frozen when its actually positive) while some errors are less serious (e.g. calling a negative margin positive on frozen which results in the surgeon submitting an additional margin which is correctly called negative). While both are errors, one results in more significant consequences for the patient. Both will result in QA citations but they are of different severity.
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But for what? Surg path? Frozens? It's a meaningless number without context.
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