Do frozen sections help achieve adequate surgical margins in the resection of oral carcinoma?

This retrospective study examined the notes of 82 patients who underwent an attempted curative resection of oro-pharyngeal carcinoma, and who had frozen sections taken, over a four year period. Three hundred and fifty mucosal, 179 deep tissue, and 22 nerve frozen sections had been taken. Concordance between cryostat and paraffin sections was 99.5% although no false positives or negatives for invasive tumour were found. Nine (11%) patients who had frozen sections which were reported as dysplastic or positive for invasive tumour underwent further local resection; excision was then found to be complete in 8 (10%) of these patients with further frozen sections. In 15 patients the margins of the main resection specimen were judged to be close to the tumour (