Is rapid pathology accurate in breast surgery

Rapid pathology is frozen section examination. Frozen section examination is more accurate in breast surgery, but due to the shorter time of the whole diagnostic process, the diagnosis rate is lower compared with conventional paraffin section examination. Frozen section examination is a commonly used clinical pathology examination, which mainly involves fast freezing the tissue taken from the patient’s local area into hard blocks and then making sections for pathological diagnosis, so as to determine the patient’s condition. Frozen section examination in breast surgery is more accurate, the main purpose is to determine whether the patient’s local lesions are tumors, to determine the benign or malignant nature of the tumor, and to determine whether there is tumor infiltration near the surgical incision of the specimen margins, etc. The clinical accuracy rate is generally more than 95%. However, since frozen section examination is conducted during the patient’s surgery, pathology needs to help doctors judge whether the surgery can be ended and whether the scope of surgery needs to be expanded through the diagnostic results, etc. The whole diagnostic process is shorter, and the results are usually available in 15~30 minutes. Therefore, the confirmed diagnosis rate of frozen section is lower compared with conventional paraffin section examination, and there is a certain delayed diagnosis rate and misdiagnosis rate. To summarize, the accuracy of frozen section examination is not as good as routine paraffin section examination, but the overall accuracy is still high, so patients do not need to be overly nervous, and actively cooperate with the doctor for examination and treatment.