Evaluation of diagnostic criteria for canine glioma

A multi-institutional team led by researchers at North Carolina State University found that the use of recently published diagnostic criteria for canine glioma resulted in a strong diagnostic consensus among pathologist.

Gliomas are tumors that develop in the brain and spinal cord and account for 30-40% of intracranial tumors in dog.

It wasn't until 2018 that the Comparative Brain Tumor Consortium (CBTC) created a set of diagnostic criteria designed to help veterinary pathologists reach a consensus on a diagnosis that dogs had a similar set of criteri.

"The CBTC diagnostic criteria system is not only very useful in the clinical diagnosis of canine patients, but also in facilitating inter-agency research collaboration because it allows everyone to speak the same language when it comes to diagnosis," said co-lead author of the paper Gregory Krane, a veterinary pathologist who currently works at Moderna, was a P.

Krane took 85 glioma samples from dogs examined in North Carolina from 2006 to 2018. Five pathologists—one MD neuropathologist, two veterinary neuropathologists, and two veterinary pathologists with no subspecialty training in neuropathology—examined the samples separately using the CBTC guideline.

There are three types of canine gliomas: oligodendroglioma, astrocytoma, and undefined gliom.

Concordance was defined as agreement among 3 or more of the 5 pathologists on tumor subtype and grad.

One of the study's first authors, Keith Shockley, a biostatistician at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), helped perform advanced statistical analysis of the diagnoses to obtain the kappa statistic, which The data estimated the degree of agreement among different raters beyond what could be predicted by chance alon.

Kappa statistics are frequently used in human studies to quantify diagnostic consensus, mainly in the fields of pathology and radiolog.

"These results show that the CBTC system is as reliable as those used in human studies," Crane sai.

The study also showed that even with detailed diagnostic criteria, the consensus among pathologists is often not 100.

The study, published in Veterinary and Comparative Oncology, was funded by NIEHS and the North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicin.