Appraisal of self-collected cervical specimens in cytologic screening of uterine cancer.

Cytologic specimens were collected simultaneously by three methods on 122 patients with cervical neoplastic lesions: self-irrigated collection, self-scraped collection and physician-scraped collection. In invasive epidermoid carcinoma, the accuracy with the self-collected specimens approached the physician-scraped specimens. There was a serious defect in the detection of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia by the self-irrigation method. In carcinoma in situ and dysplasia, the self-scraping method was considerably better than the self-irrigation method. In mass screening of 89,206 females, the self-scraping positive detection rates were closer to the physican-scraping results than the self-irrigation method.