Breast fine needle aspiration cytology. 12-year experience with histological and clinical follow-up in a single Australian laboratory

Abstract

Fine needle aspiration cytology is increasingly used to diagnose carcinoma of the breast. This study evaluates our experience over a 12-year period with 836 patients with histological or clinical follow-up; the last published Australian review was undertaken almost one decade ago. Interinstitutional comparison is difficult due to adoption of differing statistical methodology and the varied emphasis placed on the intermediate categories of suspicious and atypical findings. In this series, adopting the definitions used by the Quality Assurance Probe of the College of American Pathologists, the overall sensitivity of the fine needle aspiration procedure was 83.9%, sensitivity of cytological diagnosis 93.1%, and specificity for absence of cancer 96.2%; the true false positive diagnostic rate was 0.2% and true false negative 5.3%. These are comparable with previous reported studies and confirm the reliability of fine needle aspiration cytology in the diagnosis of breast cancer even when smears come from multiple aspirators and sources and relatively small numbers are seen.