Diagnosis of breast lump by fine needle aspiration cytology and mammography.

Breast carcinoma is the most common malignant tumour and the leading cause of death from cancer in women. A large number of patients in Bangladesh have been suffering from breast cancer. Now-a-days, Fine needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) is being performed as a pre-operative test to evaluate breast lump. FNAC is cost effective and can prevent unnecessary surgery. As FNAC became more reliable in diagnosing malignancy and thereby the use of frozen-section histology had been reduced by about 80%. But erroneous diagnosis is more common with FNAC than with histopathology. However, mammography can identify breast cancers too small to palpate on physical examination and theoretically beneficial to diagnose even noninvasive lesions. Present study aimed to see the accuracy of FNAC and mammography in the diagnosis of palpable breast lumps and to study their correlation. In this study 222 patients were included in the study and FNAC was done in all the patients. Mammography was done in 112 cases. Among these 112 patients 32 cases were found malignant. Histopathology was done in total 89 cases. Among 112 patients who were underwent mammography only 43 were found for histopathology. Finally, 36 cases were found malignant. Fibroadenoma is mostly found in below 20 years group and malignancy is mostly occurring in older age group. Mammography shows total 8 false positive and 5 false negative cases. FNAC shows only 1 false positive and 1 false negative case. On analysis mammography showed 82.76% sensitivity, 90.36% specificity, 75% Positive predictive value (PPV), 93.75% Negative predictive value (NPV) and 88.39% accuracy. FNAC showed 97.22% sensitivity, 99.46% specificity, 97.220% PPV, 99.46% NPV and 99.095% accuracy. Mammography was found to be less sensitive, specific and accurate in the diagnosis of breast lump though there is highly significant correlation among them. However, the study has shown a much higher performance of FNAC than other previous studies indicating the improved skill in cytological diagnosis to a satisfactory level.