Introduction: Salivary gland tumors are often difficult to diagnose precisely preoperatively. Although intraoperative pathological examination by frozen sections (FS) is useful for perioperative diagnosis, we sometimes encounter a mismatch of diagnoses between FS and paraffin-embedded specimens. Here, we studied the usefulness of FS for salivary gland tumors.
Method: We conducted a retrospective analysis of the data of 250 patients with salivary gland tumors who underwent intraoperative FS examination between January 2013 and December 2019 at our hospital. The sensitivity and specificity of FS were calculated, and the diagnostic accuracy was statistically compared between parotid gland tumors and submandibular gland tumors.
Results: The sensitivity and specificity of diagnosis of salivary gland tumors by FS were 80% and 99%, respectively. The diagnostic accuracy for submandibular gland tumors was lower than that for parotid gland tumors. The time required for a precise histopathological diagnosis was longer when there was a mismatch between the intraoperative diagnosis and the histopathological diagnosis.
Conclusion: FS was useful for perioperative examination of salivary gland tumors. Accurate diagnosis of submandibular gland tumors was more difficult than that of parotid gland tumors. A combination of various examinations is necessary to determine the most suitable operative method for salivary gland tumors.
