The significance of the imprint cytology in breast biopsy diagnosis.

Tissue biopsies of the breast with and without carcinomas were examined simultaneously by intraoperative histology and imprint cytology. In 95 per cent of the cases there was a good agreement between the histologic and cytologic diagnoses. The reliability of the imprint cytology was tested in some complicated cases such as proliferating fibroadenomas, pseudoinvasive adenosis and carcinomas. In 20.2 per cent of the cases with carcinoma, the tumor cells showed peculiar intracytoplasmic inclusions, whereas such inclusions were found only in 0.43 per cent of the biopsies of mammas without carcinoma. Their morphological variations and the histochemical pattern are discussed. The results have demonstrated that simultaneous cytologic examination of unfixed mamma biopsies can be a good screening method and that the intracytoplasmic inclusions may be an especially helpful histopathologic feature in the diagnosis of breast cancer.