News from the Universities: Postgraduaat Radiologie van de Vlaamse Universiteiten. Programma 2012-2013

In this presentation, we reported a retrospective study on our experience in CT-guided percutaneous lung biopsy performed by residents having a low or limited previous experience. We compared our results with those obtained by experienced operators and published in large studies of the literature in terms of accuracy and side effects. The study included 229 patients (male: 131 - female: 98 - average age: 65 y) that underwent percutaneous lung biopsy (lesion diameter range : 6,9 to 163 mm - average : 32,3 mm) under CT control from 1 September, 2009, to 11 April, 2011. All biopsies were performed by two residents during their second/third year of residency. A first resident learned from an experienced radiologist in interventional radiology and, after a few weeks, he began to perform biopsies by himself. The ten first biopsies were performed in close supervision of the experienced radiologist. After some months of experience the first resident taught and trained the second resident. Usual indications and contraindications for lung biopsy were applied. Usual technique was used with both 18G fine needle aspiration and 20G co-axial tru-cut needle combined technique under CT fluoroscopic control. In 2 cases of the 229 biopsies, a sample was not obtained due to an immediate pneumothorax. Lesions reported as suspicious of malignancy at pathology, including atypical adenomatous/alveolar hyperplasia, were considered as a false negative biopsy (n = 7) for analysis. Malignant, benign and false negative samples were obtained in 78%, 18% and 4%, respectively. This represents a global accuracy of 94.7%, which is closely similar to other studies (Table I).