| Conventional smears | Smears prepared from bleach-sedimented sputum * | p-value |
---|---|---|---|
Acid-fast bacilli counts per 100 microscopy fields, geometric mean (95% CI) | 346 (139-862) | 166 (68-406) | 0.02 |
Slide-reading time, arithmetic mean minutes (standard error of the mean) | 11.2 (0.92) | 9.6 (0.69) | 0.03 |
Inter-observer agreement, correlation coefficient (r) | 0.991 | 0.997 | - |
Correlation between concentrating effect of bleach-sedimentation and acid-fast bacilli counts, correlation coefficient (r) | -0.46 | 0.02 | |
Correlation between concentrating effect of bleach-sedimentation and volume of the sputum specimen, correlation coefficient (r) | -0.13 | 0.7 | |
Concentrating effect of bleach-sedimentation comparing salivary versus mucoid sputum specimens | - | 0.3 | |
Concentrating effect of bleach-sedimentation comparing moderately versus very experienced microscopists | - | 0.6 |