Cell block technology in the pathological diagnosis of pleural effusion / 中国组织工程研究

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Cytologic smear is a routine detection method for pleural effusion, but the results are far from satisfactory. Therefore, pleural effusion is made into cell block for immunochemistry and gene detection, to improve the detection accuracy, which contributes to the treatment and prognosis of pleural effusion. OBJECTIVE: To explore the application value of cell block technology in the pathological diagnosis and molecular detection of pleural effusion. METHODS: Totally 105 cases of pleural effusion samples were collected at Department of Pathology, Peking University First Hospital between January 2016 and August 2017. Effective components extracted after centrifugation were used to make paraffin blocks for hematoxylin-eosin staining and immunocytochemical staining thereafter. Genetic mutations were further detected in the cases of lung cancer diagnosed by cytology.RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: The positive rate of routine cytological smear was 30.5% (32/105), which was significantly lower than that of the cell block section (44.8%, 47/105). The positive rate of immunocytochemical staining combined with cell block was the highest one with 57.1%, 60/105). Besides, this method could be used to identify tumor types. Gene mutation detection was performed in 19 cases of lung cancer, among which 13 cases were positive. These results indicate that cell block technology combined with immunocytochemical staining is an effective method for the diagnosis of malignancy and tumor origin in pleural effusion, and can be further used for mutation detection.