Table 1.
Clinical information and meta data about autopsy patients from 1988 to 2008.
Table 2.
Criteria for evaluating discrepancies modified after Goldman et al. (1983) and Battle et al. (1987).
Table 3.
Distribution of pathological diagnoses at autopsy.
Figure 1.
Development of the discrepancies between clinical and pathological diagnoses at the Charité hospital during the last 20 years.
300 cases were included into the analysis for each of the years 1988 (GDR), 1988 (FRG), 1993, 1998, 2003 and 2008. Cases were assigned to discrepancy classes I to VI according to the modified Goldman criteria. a) Country and time dependent distribution of the discrepancy classes I–VI. b) Significant decrease of major discrepancies and significant increase of minor discrepancies between 1988 and 2008. 1988 = pooled GDR and FRG cases.
Figure 2.
a) Class I discrepancy rates for male and female patients. b) Dependence of the class I discrepancy rates on age and sex of the patients. All 1800 “study” cases (1988–2008) were included into the analysis.
Figure 3.
Influence of type of hospital and type of ward.
a) Class I discrepancy rates for university and community hospitals. b) Class I discrepancy rates rates for ICU’s and LAICU’s.
Figure 4.
Identification of low and high risks case characteristics for class I discrepancies based on a two-dimensional subgroup analysis.
Patients were grouped according to demographics or the ward where they were treated. This grouping was intersected with a second grouping according to disease groups. For each of the subgroups, the percentage of discrepancies was calculated and compared to the percentage of discrepancies for patients not in the subgroup. Heatmaps of discrepancy rates were generated using hierarchical clustering based on the euclidean distance of rate profiles. The overall class I discrepancy rate of 19.5% [17.4%–21.9%] for 1200 cases (black) between 1993 and 2008 served as reference for decreased (green) or increased (red) class I discrepancy rates. a) Dependence of class I discrepancy rates on ICD-10 disease groups, age and sex of the patients. Sample sizes were comparable for patients being under 65 years (n = 615) and patients older than 65 (n = 585). b) Dependence of class I discrepancy rates on ICD-10 disease groups, type of hospital and type of ward. x = p<0.05 (x) = p<0.1.