Original Research Article
Year: 2016 | Month: January | Volume: 3 | Issue: 1 | Pages: 16-22
Diagnostic Accuracy of FNAC in Soft Tissue Tumors: Experience at a Tertiary Cancer Referral Centre in India
Neha Garg1, P. C. Jha2
1DNB, Department of Pathology, 2Head of Department of Pathology,
Mahavir Cancer Institute and Research Centre, Patna (Bihar)- 801505, India
Corresponding Author: Neha Garg
ABSTRACT
Background: Soft tissue tumors (STT) are very rare in general population. They are always a challenging lesion for the pathologist to diagnose due to the wide morphological overlapping and the biological heterogeneity. Role of Fine needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) as a diagnostic tool for the suspected soft tissue mass is a matter of debate due to the conflicting observations reported in the literature world-wide.
Methods: We conducted this study on 89 patients to compute the diagnostic accuracy of the FNAC procedure as compared to the gold standard technique i.e. histopathological examination of the biopsied tissue.
Results: In this study we found that malignant and benign cases constituted 67.41% and 21.34% of all the cases. Malignant cases were most common in the age-group of 20-40 years and benign cases were common in the age-group of 40-60 years. Overall, the lower extremity was the most common site of involvement by STTs, followed by trunk and upper extremity. The most commonly diagnosed tumor was spindle cell type with slight predilection for males. The accuracy rate was of 92.40% for the nature of lesion (benignancy Vs malignancy) with sensitivity, specificity of 95% and 84.21% respectively, which was statistically significant (p<0.0001). The cytological diagnosis of 7.50% cases was found discordant with histopathological diagnosis.
Conclusion: FNAC proved to be a good diagnostic tool for diagnosing STTs and must be always considered as complementary tool for diagnosing suspected soft tissue mass, especially in healthcare set-up that has minimal access to the advanced diagnostic procedures.
Keywords: Soft tissue tumors, FNAC, histopathology.