Do retroperitoneal extragonadal germ cell tumours exist?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Extragonadal germ cell tumours (GCTs) have been described arising in midline structures. Although primary retroperitoneal extragonadal GCTs (RPGCTs) comprise 30% to 40% of these, their existence as a genuine disease has been questioned. Our study evaluated clinicopathological findings to examine this question in RPGCT patients at our centre. METHODS: Data from 414 men between 1980 and 2014 treated at London Health Sciences Centre with chemotherapy for testicular GCTs were reviewed retrospectively. Primary RPGCT was defined as pathologically diagnosed GCT with no evidence of GCT in the testes by physical exam or ultrasound. Patients thought to have primary RPGCT at the time of initial diagnosis were identified from an electronic database and data were extracted. RESULTS: In total, 18 men with a diagnosis of metastatic RPGCT were identified. Four were excluded due to ultrasound reports that were incomplete or suggested malignancy. The remaining 14 patients had negative or non-specific ultrasounds, and all received platinum-based combination chemotherapy. Ten patients (71%) underwent post-chemotherapy RP lymph node dissections; of those 8 (57%) who underwent orchiectomy, none had corresponding pathologically normal testicular tissue. CONCLUSION: RPGCT patients present with more advanced disease stage. Our study sample size is limited, but the findings are consistent with existing literature suggesting that primary RPGCTs may not exist as a unique disease, but instead may represent metastatic disease from a clinically occult testicular primary. By corollary, viable malignant germ cells may be present in testes of patients with presumed primary RPGCT, and may persist as a site of residual malignant disease after chemotherapy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".