Frozen section in pituitary surgery
- Departments of Neurosurgery and Otolaryngology, and the Division of Neuropathology, State University of New York, Health Science Center at Brooklyn, New York, USA
- Dr Gady Har-El, SUNY-Health Science Center at Brooklyn, Box 126, 450 Clarkson Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11203.
Most surgeons consider intraoperative frozen section examination as an important part of pituitary surgery.1 2Frozen section is used to establish a histological diagnosis (adenoma, other tumours, hyperplasia, and non-neoplastic processes) and to examine the margins of resection and determine its adequacy.1 2 A reliable intraoperative histological diagnosis will help the surgeon with achieving the ultimate goal in pituitary surgery—namely, selective removal of the lesion with preservation of endocrine function.3 With the increased popularity of the transsphenoidal approach for microsurgical removal of pituitary lesions, mainly microadenomas, the reliability of the frozen section technique becomes even more important. It has been stated that the trans-sphenoidal route provides the surgeon with suboptimal exposure of the gland and therefore smaller pieces of tissue are submitted for evaluation by frozen section.4 5 Some authors suspect that this may result in a lesser degree of accuracy of the intraoperative rapid diagnostic techniques.4 5
There are only a few papers in the English literature …
