Fine needle aspiration cytology is well accepted as a safe, reliable, minimal invasive and cost-effective method and can be applied for initial diagnosis of palpable lesions of skin. Its accuracy when applied by experienced and well trained practitioners matches that of histopathology in providing an equivocal diagnosis; so it can also be used as a very useful alternative to excision biopsy. A total of 57 patients with palpable nodular lesions were included in the study. All patients were randomly selected, irrespective of their age, religion, marital status, occupation or social status. Every patient underwent a FNAC done on OPD basis by a trained pathologist following a thorough clinical check-up. Every patient subjected to FNAC underwent skin biopsy, so subjected to histopathology. The results thus obtained from histopathology were matched with those of FNAC and a correlation was sought based on statistical tests. The overall diagnostic accuracy was 89.4%, the sensitivity was 94.4% and specificity was 100%.

Keywords:  FNAC, nodular lesions.

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