Diagnostic accuracy of fine needle aspiration cytology in the diagnosis of malignant breast lesions

Abstract

Introduction: For cases with breast lump, distinguishing benign from malignant lesions is of paramount importance not only for patient care but for proper management as well. The present study was carried out to assess the diagnostic accuracy of FNAC when compared against the gold standard of histopathological examination in the diagnosis of carcinoma breast. Methodology: We included patients referred to our department with palpable breast lump. These patients underwent FNAC procedure, after which histopathological examination was done. Data were collected and analysed to present descriptive statistics. Using histopathological diagnosis as the gold standard, diagnostic accuracy of FNAC was determined. Results: We included 54 patients. The most common age group was 51 to 60 years (27.78%) and 88.8% were married. Of the 30 benign patients on histopathological diagnosis, fibroadenmoa was seen in 15 patients (50% of all benign) and among the 24 cases diagnosed with malignant lesions on histopathological examination, 20 had intraductal carcinoma. On FNAC, we observed 57% of the patients (n=31) to have benign lesions and rest 43% (n=23) to have malignant lesions. Using histopathological diagnosis as gold standard, we calculated the diagnostic accuracy of FNAC for the diagnosis of carcinoma breast to be 98.1% (Table 3). The sensitivity was 95.8%, specificity was 100%, positive and negative predictive values were 96.8% and 100% respectively.Conclusions: FNAC is an efficient, safe and inexpensive method which can provide reasonably accurate differentiation between benign and malignant cases.