Keywords:
Interventional non-vascular, CT, Ultrasound, Biopsy, Cancer, Lymphoma, Pathology
DOI:
10.26044/ranzcr2022/R-0024
Conclusion
Our institution's diagnostic yield is 92.5%, which is similar to other institutions [1, 2]. Most factors found to contribute towards a non-diagnostic biopsy were due to lesion characteristics, such as small lesions (Fig. 1, 2 and 3), mobile lesions (Fig. 2), lesions that were difficult to localise (Fig. 1 and 3) or lesions that were in difficult places to access (Fig. 4). At the current time, there are limited means to address the lesion characteristics itself. However, technical and equipment factors may be modified to improve diagnostic yield. For example, use of different biopsy equipment (e.g. different needle gauge) for lesions which are difficult to penetrate or use of different imaging modalities for lesions which are difficult to localise (e.g. US or CT). Our study was not designed to evaluate for the effects of technique or equipments on diagnostic yield, although this could be assessed in future studies. For cytological studies, the presence of a cytologist is able to assess for specimen adequacy as is seen in Fig. 1 which confirmed in real-time that inadequate thyroid tissue was obtained.