Aspiration biopsy cytology a highly diagnostic procedure for assessing neck masses, excluding thyroid tumors.

Aspiration biopsy cytology (ABC) was done on one hundred and forty-five patients with cervical tumors, excluding primary tumors of the thyroid and local metastasis of thyroid cancer, during the period of 44 months from 1981–85. Surgery was done on a total of fifty-five patients with lesions evaluated to be malignant and requiring resection. A correlation was determined between the histological diagnosis based on permanent paraffin sections and the diagnosis made by aspiration biology cytology in order to evaluate ABC in terms of accuracy together with its complications and limitations. The false positive rate was 6.6 per cent and the false negative rate was 8.3 per cent. Histologic diagnosis was predictable by ABC in eighty per cent of cases, but difficulty was experienced in predicting the histologic diagnosis in cases of a poorly differentiated malignancy. A few cases of slight subcutaneous bleeding occurred, but seeding implantation of cancer cells was nil. It was confirmed that ABC is a highly diagnostic procedure for assessing cervical tumors. The method is simple, safe and economical.