Ventana immunohistochemistry assay for anaplastic lymphoma kinase gene rearrangement detection in patients with non‐small cell lung cancer: A meta‐analysis

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to evaluate the diagnostic value of Ventana immunohistochemistry (IHC) assay for anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) gene rearrangement screening in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). METHODS Open published studies that reported the diagnostic performance of Ventana IHC assay for ALK gene rearrangement detection in NSCLC patients were extracted from PubMed, Embase, Google scholar, Wanfang, and China National Knowledge Infrastructure. The general information and number of true positive (tp), false positive (fp), false negative (fn), and true negative (tn) cases identified by Ventana IHC assay were extracted. The diagnostic sensitivity, specificity, positive likelihood ratio (+lr), negative likelihood ratio (-lr), diagnostic odds ratio (dor) and the summary receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve were calculated using Stata 11.0 software. RESULTS Ten studies, including 240 ALK positive and 1973 ALK negative NSCLC patients were included in this meta-analysis. The pooled diagnostic sensitivity, specificity, +lr, -lr, and dor were 0.94 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.85-0.98), 1.00 (95% CI 0.99-1.00), 859.61 (95% CI 60.81-1200.00), 0.06 (95% CI 0.03-0.16), and 1400.00 (95% CI 813.29-23 000.00), respectively. The area under the ROC curve was 0.996 for Ventana IHC assay in detecting ALK gene rearrangement in NSCLC patients. CONCLUSION The sensitivity and specificity of Ventana IHC assay for the detection of ALK gene rearrangement were high, thus Ventana IHC could substitute fluorescence in situ hybridization for the screening of ALK+ NSCLC patients.