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. 2024 Feb:171:111291.
doi: 10.1016/j.ejrad.2024.111291. Epub 2024 Jan 9.

Assessing the impact of structured reporting on learning how to report lung cancer staging CT: A triple cohort study on inexperienced readers

L Cereser  1 , F Cortiula  2 , C Simiele  3 , V Peruzzi  4 , M Bortolot  5 , A Tullio  6 , G Como  7 , C Zuiani  8 , R Girometti  9
Affiliations

Assessing the impact of structured reporting on learning how to report lung cancer staging CT: A triple cohort study on inexperienced readers

L Cereser et al. Eur J Radiol. 2024 Feb.

Abstract

Purpose: To assess the clinical utility of chest computed tomography (CT) reports for non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) staging generated by inexperienced readers using structured reporting (SR) templates from the Royal College of Radiologists (RCR-SR) and the Italian Society of Medical and Interventional Radiology (SIRM-SR), compared to traditional non-systematic reports (NSR).

Methods: In a cohort of 30 NSCLC patients, six third-year radiology residents reported CT examinations in two 2-month-apart separate sessions using NSR in the first and NSR, RCR-SR, or SIRM-SR in the second. Couples of expert radiologists and thoracic oncologists in consensus evaluated completeness, accuracy, and clarity. All the quality indicators were expressed on a 100-point scale. The Wilcoxon signed ranks, and Wilcoxon-Mann Whitney tests were used for statistical analyses.

Results: Results showed significantly higher completeness for RCR-SR (90 %) and SIRM-SR (100 %) compared to NSR (70 %) in the second session (all p < 0.001). SIRM-SR demonstrated superior accuracy (70 % vs. 55 %, p < 0.001) over NSR, while RCR-SR and NSR accuracy did not significantly differ (60 % vs. 62.5 %, p = 0.06). In the second session, RCR-SR and SIRM-SR surpassed NSR in completeness, accuracy, and clarity (all p < 0.001, except p = 0.04 for accuracy between RCR-SR and NSR). SIRM-SR outperformed RCR-SR in completeness (100 % vs. 90 %, p < 0.001) and accuracy (70 % vs. 62.5 %, p = 0.002), with equivalent clarity (90 % for both, p = 0.27).

Conclusions: Inexperienced readers using RCR-SR and SIRM-SR demonstrated high-quality reporting, indicating their potential in radiology residency programs to enhance reporting skills for NSCLC staging and effective interaction with all the physicians involved in managing NSCLC patients.

Keywords: Computed tomography; Italian Society of Medical and Interventional Radiology; Lung cancer staging; Radiology residency programs; Royal College of Radiologists; Structured reporting.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.