What is rapid pathology examination

Routine pathology biopsies take approximately 3-4 days to produce pathology report results. Sometimes, for therapeutic reasons, clinicians need to obtain pathology results quickly during the procedure and thus need to alert the pathologist for an urgent consultation, which is called rapid pathology examination. It is also called rapid frozen pathology because the process of dehydrating, waxing, and curing the tissue specimen is often replaced by freezing. Rapid frozen pathological examination is the most challenging work in pathology department, with fast and short production time, usually able to make pathological diagnosis within 30 minutes. The approximate process is as follows: 1. After excision of the diseased tissue, the patient lies on the operating table and waits, the surgeon sends the surgically excised tissue to the pathology department urgently, and the pathology department quickly freezes the tissue to about -20°C through a special embedding agent, and then after the tissue hardens The pathologist will make a quick diagnosis under the microscope and present a reference pathological diagnosis to the surgeon within half an hour, and the surgeon will choose the corresponding surgical plan according to the pathological diagnosis. For example, for ovarian tumors, if the pathology department reports ovarian cancer, the surgeon may have to remove all the ovaries, uterus and both adnexa. If the report is benign, only the mass will be removed. The accuracy of frozen pathology diagnosis is not as accurate as conventional histopathology because of the short time spent and the small number of people involved, which is about 95% accuracy. Therefore, the frozen pathology diagnostic report must be applied urgently in surgery and cannot replace the conventional tissue diagnostic report.