Ratan Konjengbam1 , Persy Haobijam2
BACKGROUND Lung cancer is the major cause of cancer related deaths all over the world. Computed Tomography (CT) - Guided Fine Needle Aspiration Cytology (FNAC) of a lung mass is an effective modality to diagnose lung cancer. FNAC is a rapidly emerging diagnostic modality to assess the nature of radiologically demonstrated lung mass lesions. We wanted to study the usefulness of CT-Guided FNAC in the evaluation of cytopathological spectrum in lung lesions. METHODS A cross- sectional study was carried out in a total of 150 cases for a period of 5 years from November 2014 to November 2019 on cases of lung mass lesions with a strong clinical suspicion of pulmonary neoplasm. CT-Guided transthoracic FNAC was performed and cytology smears were stained with May-Grunwald-Giemsa (MGG) stain, conventional Papanicolaou (Pap) stain and Ziehl Neelsen (ZN) stain. Smears were examined under microscope and broadly categorized into unsatisfactory, tubercular, benign and malignant lesions. RESULTS A total of 150 cases of lung mass lesions were studied, of which 85 were males (78.4%). The mean age of the patients was 67 years. Maximum cases of benign lesions were chronic non-specific suppurative lesions (17.3%, 26 cases) followed by tuberculosis (3.3%, 05 cases). Regarding the malignant categories, adenocarcinoma (22.7%; 34 cases) was the most common malignancy followed by non-small cell carcinoma not otherwise specified (NOS) (14.7%; 22 cases), squamous cell carcinoma (8.0%, 12 cases) and small cell carcinoma (6.7%; 10 cases) respectively. CONCLUSIONS CT guided FNAC is a simple, less expensive, and reliable method for diagnosis of pulmonary lesions.
