accuracy of intraoperative frozen section diagnosis and touch imprint cytology: study on 1000 consecutive cases

frozen section and touch imprint cytology are important diagnostic procedures for surgeons during operation and must be accurate if the patient is to receive maximum benefit. to assess the accuracy of intraoperative pathologic consultation including frozen section and touch imprint cytology during a five year period (1995- 2000), a retrospective survey of 1000 consecutive cases of frozen sections performed by the staff pathologists of shiraz medical school and 211 touch imprint cytology cases related to some of these sections were studied focusing on accuracy. also some 462 cases of frozen sections related to the 1000 samples were reviewed by the staff pathologists without complete clinical data and without any data from the surgeon to determine the importance of the surgeon pathologist relationship. the gold standard method for comparing the results of frozen section and cytology was permanent tissue diagnosis. the overall accuracy of frozen section for the 1000 cases was 93.6%. the accuracy of cytology was 93.1 %. also the accuracy of 462 frozen sections which were reviewed without clinical data was 85%. in conclusion, frozen section diagnosis is a highly accurate method. touch imprint cytology is also a specific method and can be used in areas where facilities of frozen section studies are not available. the frozen section method achieves its highest accuracy when there is cooperation between the surgeon and pathologist and when used in combination with touch imprint cytology.