Preparation of high-quality cell block frozen sections from clinical cytologic samples:: A technical report

초록

Background: Cell blocks are the most commonly utilized cell preparation that can be used for special stains and immunocytochemistry for the differential diagnosis of difficult cytology cases. However, the quality of cell block sections cannot always be guaranteed, especially when the cell blocks need to be prepared from cytology samples with limited cellularity. The quality of a cell block in terms of cellularity can be assessed on site in advance by assessing the cellularity on cell block frozen sections. We present illustrative cases of cytology samples the quality of whose cell blocks were assessed on-site in advance using a modified agarose cell block technique. Methods: The cell pellets of Sure￢PathTM residues or scraped material of conventional smears were preembedded in ultra-low gelling temperature agarose gel and re-embedded in standard agarose gel. Each of the resulting compact agarose cell buttons was bivalved into two parts. One of them was frozen using a cryostat before sections were cut on a microtome. The other was fixed in formalin and processed in paraffin. The sections were processed for H&E- and immunocytochemical stains. Results: All the diagnostic material in each sample appeared concentrated on the viewing cytology spots