ArticleAfrican journal of laboratory medicine2017
Performance evaluation of tuberculosis smear microscopists working at rechecking laboratories in Ethiopia.
Article in African journal of laboratory medicine, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Quality of tuberculosis diagnostic laboratories in Ethiopia assessed through External Quality Assessment components: a systematic review.BMC infectious diseases · 2026Pooled it
- Proficiency and associated factors of laboratory professionals in sputum smear microscopy at selected peripheral public and private diagnostic laboratories in Ethiopia: cross-sectional study.BMC infectious diseases · 2025Article
- Sputum smears quality inspection using an ensemble feature extraction approach.Frontiers in public health · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
15 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
backgroundTuberculosis is an infectious disease caused by the bacillus
objectiveThis study assessed the performance of tuberculosis smear microscopists at external quality assessment rechecking laboratories in Ethiopia.
methodsA cross-sectional study was conducted at 81 laboratories from April to July 2015. Panel slides were prepared and validated at the National Tuberculosis Reference Laboratory. The validated panel slides were used to evaluate the performance of microscopists at these laboratories compared with readers from the reference laboratory.
resultsA total of 389 external quality assessment rechecking laboratory microscopists participated in the study, of which 268 (68.9%) worked at hospitals, 241 (62%) had more than five years of work experience, 201 (51.7%) held Bachelors degrees, and 319 (82%) reported tuberculosis smear microscopy training. Overall, 324 (83.3%) participants scored ≥ 80%. Sensitivity for detecting tuberculosis bacilli was 84.5% and specificity was 93.1%. The overall percent agreement between participants and reference readers was 87.1 (kappa=0.72). All 10 slides were correctly read (i.e., scored 100%) by 80 (20.6%) participants, 156 (40.1%) scored 90% - 95%, 88 (22.6%) scored 80% - 85% and 65 (16.7%) scored below 80%. There were 806 (20.7%) total errors, with 143 (3.7%) major and 663 (17%) minor errors.
conclusionThe overall performance of participants in reading the slides showed good agreement with the reference readers. Most errors were minor, and the ability to detect tuberculosis bacilli can be improved through building the capacity of professionals.
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