Razi Journal of Medical Sciences

    The goals of the present study were to analyze the accuracy of cytological techniques for the intra-operative diagnosis of central nervous system tumors. In this study, 50 patients with brain or spinal tumor (according to the previous physical examination and imaging studies) were evaluated in the neurosurgery center of Hazrat Rasoul-e-Akram Hospital. Cytological methods including touch, scrape and squash were performed on the fresh tissue specimen received during neurosurgical procedure. Later, cytological diagnoses were compared with final histopathological diagnoses of the same specimens. This comparison revealed 94% correlation between cytological and histopathological diagnoses(including 73% complete, 21% partial and 6% no correlation). In this study the highest rate of correlation was in cases with meningiomas, glial tumors, pituitary adenomas, medulloblastomas and epidermoid cysts.