Table 2.

Advantages and disadvantages of RNAscope technique

Factor	Study no.a
Advantages
Identify gene expression at a single-cell level within a morphological context	13, 18
Does not depend on antibodies	13
Allows the detection of mRNA as a single gene copy	12, 20
High analytical accuracy, sensitivity and specificity	1, 4, 7–9, 11,15, 17, 19–24
More reliable than IHC	3
Suppress background noise and produce better resolution than IHC	8, 15, 17, 20, 27
Reduce the risk of false-positive results	17
Its results are easy to interpret	5, 6, 8, 15, 17, 21
It is a robust and quantitative technique	11, 16, 27
It can detect tissue heterogeneity and partially degraded RNA	2, 27
Quick to perform	9, 11, 18
It can be performed automatically and manually and saves time	1, 14
Disadvantages
It is not suitable to discriminate between viral RNA transcripts and viral DNA	7
The stain will not take place well if the samples are with poor fixation quality and the cost is much higher compared to IHC	11
In cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) cases, the negativity of RNAscope does not guarantee the absence of HR-HPV	16
RNAscope was less specific differentiating AdCC from high grade basaloid sinonasal tumors	22
In the automated system, some areas in the slides need manual selection during the scoring process	26

^aThe study numbers (Study no.) in this table are used throughout the article to refer to the papers. See Table 1 for references