Intraoperative frozen section consultation: an analysis of accuracy in a teaching hospital

This is a retrospective quality assurance study of all frozen sections done at The Aga Khan University Hospital during a six year period (1986 to 1991). There were 1,031 frozen sections out of a cumulative total of 42,985 surgical specimens (2.39%). Nine hundred and severity-six (94.66%) were concordant. In 92 (8.9%) fresh specimens were brought from other hospitals of Karachi, in 37 cases (3.58%) the diagnosis was deferred till the evaluation of permanent paraffin sections and 18 (1.74%) were discordant with 7 (0.67%) false positive and 11 (1.06%) false negative. Among the discordant cases, 9 were attributed to misinterpretation, 7 due to sampling errors and 2 due to technical reasons. Some of these errors might have been avoided, but appear to be an irreducible minimum.