Cytological performance in palpable versus stereotactically sampled breast lesions

Abstract Well-defined parameters of fine needle aspiration (FNA) performance are established for breast screening cases and are equally applicable to symptomatic women. A component that may influence performance and has not been investigated is sampling method. We assessed the cytology performance for 2022 individuals who underwent excision following breast FNA. 63% had palpable masses sampled by free-hand FNA and the remaining had stereotactically directed aspiration of impalpable lesions. There was no difference in the benign:malignant biopsy ratios between the groups but in almost every other parameter stereotactic sampling performed less well than free-hand FNA. If performance figures are to be used to gauge quality and compare laboratories, it will be important to know the proportion of impalpable lesions sampled.