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. 2021 Aug 30;11(9):1569.
doi: 10.3390/diagnostics11091569.

Structured Reporting of Lung Cancer Staging: A Consensus Proposal

Vincenza Granata  1 , Roberto Grassi  2   3 , Vittorio Miele  3   4 , Anna Rita Larici  5 , Nicola Sverzellati  6 , Salvatore Cappabianca  2 , Luca Brunese  7 , Nicola Maggialetti  8 , Andrea Borghesi  9 , Roberta Fusco  10 , Maurizio Balbi  6 , Fabrizio Urraro  2 , Duccio Buccicardi  11 , Chandra Bortolotto  12 , Roberto Prost  13 , Marco Rengo  14 , Elisa Baratella  15 , Massimo De Filippo  16 , Carmelo Barresi  17 , Stefano Palmucci  18 , Marco Busso  19 , Lucio Calandriello  20 , Mario Sansone  21 , Emanuele Neri  3   22 , Francesca Coppola  23 , Lorenzo Faggioni  22
Affiliations

Structured Reporting of Lung Cancer Staging: A Consensus Proposal

Vincenza Granata et al. Diagnostics (Basel). .

Abstract

Background: Structured reporting (SR) in radiology is becoming necessary and has recently been recognized by major scientific societies. This study aimed to build CT-based structured reports for lung cancer during the staging phase, in order to improve communication between radiologists, members of the multidisciplinary team and patients.

Materials and methods: A panel of expert radiologists, members of the Italian Society of Medical and Interventional Radiology, was established. A modified Delphi exercise was used to build the structural report and to assess the level of agreement for all the report sections. The Cronbach's alpha (Cα) correlation coefficient was used to assess internal consistency for each section and to perform a quality analysis according to the average inter-item correlation.

Results: The final SR version was built by including 16 items in the "Patient Clinical Data" section, 4 items in the "Clinical Evaluation" section, 8 items in the "Exam Technique" section, 22 items in the "Report" section, and 5 items in the "Conclusion" section. Overall, 55 items were included in the final version of the SR. The overall mean of the scores of the experts and the sum of scores for the structured report were 4.5 (range 1-5) and 631 (mean value 67.54, STD 7.53), respectively, in the first round. The items of the structured report with higher accordance in the first round were primary lesion features, lymph nodes, metastasis and conclusions. The overall mean of the scores of the experts and the sum of scores for staging in the structured report were 4.7 (range 4-5) and 807 (mean value 70.11, STD 4.81), respectively, in the second round. The Cronbach's alpha (Cα) correlation coefficient was 0.89 in the first round and 0.92 in the second round for staging in the structured report.

Conclusions: The wide implementation of SR is critical for providing referring physicians and patients with the best quality of service, and for providing researchers with the best quality of data in the context of the big data exploitation of the available clinical data. Implementation is complex, requiring mature technology to successfully address pending user-friendliness, organizational and interoperability challenges.

Keywords: computed tomography; free text report; lung cancer; radiology report; structured report.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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