Abstract

The rapid frozen section method is a means of intraoperative pathological diagnosis, first introduced by Welch in 1891 and developed as a diagnostic tool by Cullen, Wilson, MacCarty et al. This method serves useful purposes, such as determining the malignancy or benignancy of a suspected lesion, determining the adequacy of a biopsy of a suspected lesion, confirming the presence or absence of metatasis, and identifying small structures. But it bears many disadvantages, the most of which is the danger of incorrect diagnosis. We studied the indications, the limitations and the accuracy of the frozen section method and the materials studied was total cases of frozen section during recent 5 years. The ovarall accuracy of the frozen section diagnosis of 1,603 cases was 96.2% with 0.3% of false positive, 3.5% of false negative and 2.8% of incorrect histological diagnoses or grading errors the tissues submitted for frozen section were lymph node, breast, gastrointestinal tract and soft tissue in decreasing order of frequency. The false positive cases were four in number, while the false negative cases were 53, one third of which were the misdiagnoses of the presence of ganglion cells in Hirschsprung's disease.