Prevalence of Abnormalities Influences Cytologists' Error Rates in Screening for Cervical Cancer

Abstract

These results provide the first evidence, to our knowledge, that experts are not immune to the effects of prevalence even with stimuli from their domain of expertise. Prevalence is a factor to consider in screening for disease by human observers and has significant implications for cytology-based cervical cancer screening in the post-human papillomavirus vaccine era, when prevalence rates of high-grade lesions in the population are expected to decline.