Fig 1.
A list of the full-text excluded articles are available in S2 Text. a We excluded the two summary reports from the International Early Lung Cancer Action Program and another two reports of its individual sites because only clinical stage information could be obtained, which is heterogeneous to the pathological staging method and could overestimate the estimates in this study.
Table 1.
Basic characteristics of the included CT lung cancer screening studies.
Table 2.
Study level subgroup analysis of sources of heterogeneity regarding the proportion of stage I cancers in CT lung cancer screening studies.
Table 3.
Individual patient data subgroup analysis of sources of heterogeneity regarding the proportion of stage I cancers in CT lung cancer screening studies.
Fig 2.
Proportion of round specific stage I cancer in six studies and summary estimates with 95% confident interval lines.
Data are shown as stage I cancers/total cancers. Cancer stages and the detected rounds were determined by the time they were diagnosed. a and b: separately summarized and smoothed in the figure lines because of the small total number of cancers (<9).
Fig 3.
Differences between the proportion of stage I cancers detected using CT and other routes (data shown as CT minus other routes).
Fig 4.
Lung cancer distributions according to the reported histological types.
(A.1) Cancers detected in the CT arm of the National Lung Study Trial. (A.2) Cancers detected in the chest radiograph arm of the National Lung Study Trial. (B.1) Summary results for CT detected cancers from randomized control trials (RCTs) other than the National Lung Study Trial. (B.2) Summary results for cancers detected in the control arms (chest radiograph or usual care) from RCTs other than the National Lung Study Trial. (C) Summary results for CT detected cancers from all available reports (including cohorts and RCTs). Only studies reporting the full spectrum of histological compositions were used.
Fig 5.
Pathologically specific stage distributions of lung cancers detected using CT in six studies.
Data pooled from the Münster[4], Israel[6], Mayo[8], Toronto[16],NELSON[18],and ITALUNG[19]studies.