Total submission of lymphadenectomy tissues removed during radical prostatectomy for prostate cancer: possible clinical significance of large-format histology.

Complete submission of lymphadenectomy specimens increases the number of recovered lymph nodes and the detection of metastatic disease. There are advantages with the whole-mount technique over complete sampling with standard cassettes in terms of time needed to sample the tissue, number of blocks to be cut, and slides to be examined. The clinical significance of the approach is that all lymph nodes are identified, including those that are not palpable. In particular, this approach avoids the fact that an individual lymph node is oversampled and counted according to number of pieces obtained by the pathologist, mainly in nodes with considerable size.