Non-imaging-guided fine-needle aspiration of liver lesions: a retrospective study of 279 patients

Table 1 Characteristics of patients with final diagnosis of liver disease

	Malignant	Benign
Number of patients	171	94
Male	99	46
Female	72	48
Age (years)
Median	69	67
Range	22-99	7-86
Symptoms (% of patients)
Weight loss	71.3	48.9
Abdominal pain	64.7	51.0
Jaundice	18.8	19.4
Signs (% of patients)
Hepatomegaly	74.3	45.7
Palpable liver mass	19.9	5.3
Ascites	16.5	15.3
Abdominal mass	7.6	5.1
Abnormal liver tests (% of patients)
Alkaline phosphatase	88.9	60.6
Aspartate aminotransferase	48.2	22.4
Bilirubin	44.1	36.7

Table 2 Direct fine-needle aspiration (FNA) diagnosis for liver lesions compared with the final diagnosis

Direct FNA cytology	Final diagnosis
	Malignant	Benign
Non-malignant	49	99
Atypical-reactive	03	05
Suspicious	16	0
Malignancy	135	1
Total	203	105

Table 3 Relationship between nonguided fine-needle aspiration cytodiagnosis and type of suspected malignant liver lesions demonstrated by different kinds of imaging liver scanning among patients with malignant liver disease

Type of imaging and lesions*	No. of imagings	True- positives	False- negatives	True- negatives	False- positives
Radioisotope
Unifocal	35	23	5	7	0
Multifocal	96	71	17	7	1
US
Unifocal	21	15	2	4	0
Multifocal	61	46	11	3	1
CT
Unifoca	l8	6	1	1	0
Multifocal	9	5	3	1	0

*Patient may have more than one imaging scanning.

Table 4 Accuracy of non-guided FNA cytodiagnosis according to first FNA (number of FNAs) or most meaningful FNA when it was repeated (number of patients)

	FNAs No. (%)	Patients No. (%)
True positive	151(74.4)	138(80.7)
True negative	104(99.0)	93(98.9)
False positive	1(1.0)	1(1.1)
False negative	52(25.6)	33(19.3)
Non-diagnostic	24(7.2)	14(5.0)
Total	332	279