Battery-powered bone drill: caution needed in densely blastic lesions.

Image-guided biopsies play an important role for pathologic diagnosis of bone tumors. Recently, motorized, battery powered bone marrow biopsy devices have been used to biopsy focal bone lesions with high accuracy. We present here two cases of densely blastic metastases where the biopsy sample could not be removed from the needle. These two cases suggest that if the lesion is densely blastic, then the sample should be small (<5 mm) to ensure that the biopsy specimen will not be stuck within the biopsy needle.