Authors: Nithin Diwagar, Ganthimathy Sekhar
Frozen section technique is a valuable tool used to rapidly prepare slides from tissue for microscopic interpretation, in surgical pathology; frozen sections are routinely used for rapid intra-operative diagnosis, providing guidance for the surgeons. An audit of this vital procedure helps to identify the efficiency, diagnostic error rates, and cause of the error and also preventive measures which can be taken to avoid those errors. Ours was a retrospective study undertaken at Saveetha medical college, Chennai. In our study out of the 160 cases, 154 cases were concordant with the final histopathological diagnosis and 6 cases were discordant, which gives an accuracy rate of 96% and a discordance rate of 4%. Discordance was primarily due to interpretation errors and errors due to limited sampling during frozen section. Knowledge of the pitfalls and causes of diagnostic errors are important in improving the accuracy of this process. Regular, periodic audits will go a long way in addressing this issue. Keywords: Audit, Accuracy rate, Discordance rate, Frozen section.
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