Using an R Program to Monitor Pathology Reports for Omissions in Reporting Ancillary Tests and Errors in Test Names

The pathology information system was PowerPath 10.0.0.19 (Sunquest Information Systems, Tucson, Arizona), with Microsoft SQL server as the database management system. The examples include reporting Ki-67 as proliferation rate, CK5 as high molecular weight keratins, CDX-2 as CDx-2, and CD1a as CD1-A. Because the test name errors and omissions constituted the real deficiencies, the specificity of the alerting emails was 70% ([47 + 309]/505). In surgical pathology, R has been reported to be used in statistical analysis,2 information extraction from the report texts,1,3 pathology report defect detection,4 and deep learning using report diagnosis texts.5 The specific use example of R program in improving the reporting of ancillary tests demonstrates that computational approach can be an effective way to improve standardization in pathology reporting in general.