title: Use of supravital toluidine blue staining to improve the efficiency of fine-needle aspiration cytology reporting in comparison to papanicolaou stain.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To see the efficiency, adequacy and accuracy of toluidine blue stained smears of FNAC of Breast thyroid and salivary glands swelling with comparison to conventional stained FNAC smears with Papanicolaou.
  
  
  METHODS
  A total of 114 aspirates from various sites were included in the study. The smears were stained with toluidine blue and conventional Papanicolaou stain and the cytomorphology of both the smears were compared. The values were tabulated and statistical tests of significance was applied.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Of the 114 aspirates included in our study the diagnostic accuracy by using papanicolaou was 78%, while it was upto 100% with supravital toluidine blue stained smears. The percentage of inadequacy was reduced to just 25%. The observations were statistically significant. Breast 37/48 (77%) and Salivary glands 11/48 (23%) respectively. The most commonly used categorization of a five-tier system was used for reporting of breast cytology, with categories ranging from insufficient materials (C1), benign (C2), atypical (C3), suspicious of malignancy (C4), or (C5) frankly malignant. Most of breast lesions were benign 25 (67.56%). There were only 9 (24.32%) malignant cases followed by 2 cases of C-4 and one case of C-3. Benign thyroid lesion were more frequent comprising of 51 (72.27%) cases. One case (1.5%) of papillary carcinoma was found while 13 case were follicular lesions. There were 4 (36.4%) cases of pleomorphic adenoma and 3 (27.3) cases of non-specific sialadenitis. There was one case (9%) of each lesion for mucoepidermoid carcinoma, adenoidcytic carcinoma and benign cyst.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Toluidine blue stained study of FNAC improves the diagnostic accuracy by minimizing the smearing and drying artifact, loss of cell sample during fixation and staining which influences the diagnostic accuracy.
authors.affiliation: Kanwal Saba, Department of Pathology and Medicine, Fatima Jinnah Medical College, Lahore, Pakistan.
authors.forename: Kanwal
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Saba
authors.affiliation: Shahida Niazi, Dept. of Pathology, King Edward Medical University, Lahore, Pakistan.
authors.forename: Shahida
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Niazi
authors.affiliation: Mulazim Hussain Bukhari, Department of Pathology and Medicine, Fatima Jinnah Medical College, Lahore, Pakistan.
authors.forename: Mulazim Hussain
authors.initials: MH
authors.lastname: Bukhari
authors.affiliation: Sardar Fakhar Imam, Department of Pathology and Medicine, Fatima Jinnah Medical College, Lahore, Pakistan.
authors.forename: Sardar Fakhar
authors.initials: SF
authors.lastname: Imam
keywords: FNAC; Papanicolaou smears; Supra vital stains; Toluidine stain smear