Intraoperative consultation of ovarian neoplasms.

A review of 313 intraoperative consultations and/or frozen section evaluations of neoplasms of the ovary was conducted. The intraoperative diagnosis of benign or malignant was compared with the diagnosis found at permanent section. Only six cases were deferred to permanent section. The overall accuracy was 93.9%. The sensitivity was 72.7%, and this was explained by the high proportion of borderline or low malignant cell tumors in this series. The specificity and predictive values were in excess of 95%. Thirteen cases were diagnosed incorrectly at intraoperative consultation. Eight of these were judged to be sampling errors, one was due to poor technical quality, and four were attributed to interpretation errors. Intraoperative consultation is, and should continue to be, a valuable tool in the evaluation of ovarian neoplasms.