Content of review 1, reviewed on September 09, 2016

Strengths: facing the challenge of improving the performance of screening for cervical cancer; interesting insight using numerical measurements already provided by existing methods; clear statement of objectives. Weaknesses: the objectives, clearly expressed, do not fully match the performance of the work. The work appears a preliminary analysis of test parameters correlation with respect to the presence of the tumor and does not develop a full hypothesis for using the parameters in clinical screening. No specificity and sensitivity analysis is performed, and it is not discussed how and if , from the population trends, it might be possible to design a classification hypothesis on individual basis. A lesion in 50% of cases in the maximum band RLU / CO is not compared with the current performance of the methodologies in use. The presentation of statistics presents some issues, for example, mean and median age of the population are reported without information on the distribution or range then part of the discussions is inaccurate in this regard; averages and medians of RLU / CO values ​​show significant discrepancy between them and so the data is informative in a limited way.

Source

    © 2016 the Reviewer (CC BY 4.0).

References

    M., O., G., C., S., R., M., C., M., S., T., S. M., M., C. 2012. Human papillomavirus viral load expressed as relative light units (RLU) correlates with the presence and grade of preneoplastic lesions of the uterine cervix in atypical squamous cells of undetermined significance (ASCUS) cytology. European Journal of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases.