Role of Aspiration Cytology in Assessing Liver Lesions - Data from a Tertiary Care Centre. -

Introduction: Diagnostic evaluation of hepatic lesions by clinical, radiological and biochemical means is a complicated task. Incorporation of ultrasound guided fine needle aspiration cytology on routine basis can aid in the same. Objectives: To study the diagnostic role and effectiveness of ultrasound guided fine needle aspiration technique in interpretation of hepatic lesions. Methodology: A total of 34 patients with clinical and radiological suspicion of a liver mass were studied using ultrasound guided aspiration in the period extending from January’2012- December’2012 and segregated into benign, primary and metastatic entities. Results: Majority of the patients were in the age group of 40-80years. Of the 34 cases, 26 (76.47%) were malignant, 1(2.9%) benign neoplasm, 3(8.8%) non-neoplastic entities and 4(11.76%) inconclusive cases. Out of 26 malignancies diagnosed, 12 were hepatocellular carcinomas (HCC) (42.3%) while 14(53.85%) were metastatic lesions thus giving a diagnostic accuracy of 97.82% in our setup. Conclusion: Fine needle aspiration cytology has proved to be a fairly accurate and minimally invasive method for the initial diagnosis of a hepatic mass. Our study proved its involvement in accurately distinguishing non-neoplastic from neoplastic lesions & categorizing different lesions.