Concordance Between Frozen Section and Permanent Section in Assessment of Resection Margins in Breast Conserving Surgery Among Patients with Breast Cancer

Introduction: Breast cancer is considered as one of the most common malignancies among Iranian women and the most common cancer among women worldwide, with an incidence of over one million new cases per year worldwide, and is still the leading cause of morbidity in women with 411,000 cases per annum. The purpose of current study is to evaluate the compliance between samples of Frozen Section and Permanent section with respect to examination of the breast mass margin in breast conserving surgery. Methods and materials: Current study was retrospective cross-sectional study in which, 143 patients with BC were included via convenient sampling method. Our study’s sample was obtained from patients who referred to Shohada Tajrish Hospital (Tehran, Iran) between 2009-2011 and went through breast mass surgery; subsequently, their tissue samples were assessed and reported via frozen section and permanent section methods. Obtained data was assessed via SPSS-24 software. Results: Results of Chi-square test reported the chi-square is equal to 126.392 and the degree of freedom (dof)=2, which indicates that the data is three-layered; significance=0.000 confirmed rejection of the null hypothesis and the non-uniformity of the data. Hence, It can be inferred that data are valid and testable. In the t-test, the number of data is 143 and its mean is 1.028, which is the same as the descriptive statistics. However, it differs from the mean of the society, which should be considered our Inferential-test results. Our zero assumption seeks out the same results of both methods. The results of the research are not rejected by the significance of 0.481 above 0.05, and the results can be stated to be the same on average. Conclusion: According to the obtained data, compliance of the Frozen section and the Permanent section in the examination of marginal breast masses in Shohada Tajrish Hospital; two sampling modalities show higher than 77.6% similarity. Furthermore, Frozen section modality tend to be quicker procedure and the results can be delivered to surgeon and in result he may make more accurate therapeutic decisions and this may reduce number of anesthesia and surgical procedures on a patients. Hence, due to high concordance rate between results of Frozen section and permanent section plus competitive advantage of time saving in frozen section approach, this approach may be considered as gold standard approach regarding evaluation of tumoral and non-tumoral masses in the examination of the breast mass margin in breast conserving surgery.