**1. Introduction**

High-risk (HR) human papillomavirus (HPV) persistent infection has been widely recognized as the main causal risk factor for the development of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) and progression to cervical cancer [1,2].

Nowadays, an increasing number of HPV tests, which differ for technology, targets, and genotyping [3], is available for HPV detection. Unfortunately, few of these have been studied and even less validated for screening [4].

The threshold of validated HR-HPV tests is CIN2+ detection because this is the clinical target for screening. However, HPV tests have been employed not only for screening, but also as a triage test and test-of-cure for follow-up of women treated for precancerous lesions.

**Citation:** Bottari, F.; Iacobone, A.D.; Radice, D.; Preti, E.P.; Preti, M.; Franchi, D.; Boveri, S.; Sandri, M.T.; Passerini, R. HPV Tests Comparison in the Detection and Follow-Up after Surgical Treatment of CIN2+ Lesions. *Diagnostics* **2022**, *12*, 2359. https:// doi.org/10.3390/diagnostics12102359

Academic Editor: Ivana Kholová

Received: 30 August 2022 Accepted: 24 September 2022 Published: 29 September 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

If many studies are not present in previous literature regarding HPV tests in the screening setting, even less is known about their use in the follow-up after surgical treatment [5]. The objectives of post-treatment follow-up testing are to confirm that treatment was effective, to identify recurrence early, and to reassure women. Therefore, looking for the persistence of the same HPV genotype identified at baseline would be helpful for stratifying the risk of CIN recurrence, also known as "treatment failure" [6,7].

The aim of the present study is to evaluate and to compare the performance of six HPV DNA tests and one HPV mRNA test from liquid-based cervical cytology samples, for the detection of CIN2+ at baseline and as "test-of-cure" during post-treatment follow-up. The secondary objective of the study is to determine the sensitivity and the specificity of different HPV tests in the settings of screening and post-treatment follow-up.
