The rate and clinical features of patients admitted to King George V Hospital with extraovarian peritoneal serous papillary carcinoma during a 9-year period were reviewed. In this time, 31 of 236 (13%) patients with an initial diagnosis of invasive serous ovarian carcinoma fulfilled the surgicopathologic criteria for this entity. All patients had disseminated tumor equivalent to ovarian Stage I11 and IV disease (International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO]) and with predominantly high-grade neoplasms. They were managed by surgical exploration, tumor debulking where possible, and postoperative chemotherapy. A comparison with a contemporaneous series of 139 patients with primary epithelial ovarian carcinoma matched for stage and grade of disease and managed similarly showed no difference in actuarial survival. The median survival times were 11.3 months for patients with extraovarian serous papillary carcinomas and 13.5 months for patients with equivalent primary ovarian neoplasms. The features of the disease and the treatment regimens used are discussed. Cancer 64:llO-115, 1989.

We report on the testing of a prototype of an electronic device for the detection of cervix cancer and its precursors, known as the Polarprobe. The device monitors three aspects of the cervix tissue; two relate to optical properties and the other to dielectric characteristics. The response to tissue stimulation takes the form of an energy pattern which, in conjunction with spectroscopic discriminants, can be digitized to prepare an algorithm. The pattern algorithms are sufficiently characteristic to be afforded names which correspond to tissue states recognizable as normal or abnormal by the clinician. On a tissue observation basis the previously established recognition algorithms derived from 106 volunteers produced assessments which related strongly to colposcopy/histology diagnoses obtained on 77 additional volunteers. This concordance between colposcopy/histology and Polarprobe diagnoses on this primary analysis subgroup ranged from 85% on low-grade intraepithelial abnormalities, and 90% on high-grade cervical intraepithelial squamous neoplasia, to 99% on invasive cancer. An extrapolation of these results suggests false-positive/false-negative rates in the order of 10% are achievable with the current Polarprobe device.

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