Pancreas

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Atlas of Fine Needle Aspiration Cytology

Abstract

Preoperative biopsy of pancreatic masses and cysts is performed to provide a diagnosis and direct patient management, which ranges from conservative observation to surgery. Increasingly, neoadjuvant chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy has been used to treat resectable and borderline resectable cancers due to its ability to induce tumor regression, treat micro-metastases, and reduce the risk of positive margins and peritoneal implantation on resection. Endoscopic ultrasound and fine-needle aspiration sampling (EUS-FNA) has become the favored method of biopsy over the past decade. This method has many advantages over percutaneous FNA but introduces challenges with gastrointestinal contamination. For the pathologist, the differential diagnosis of a pancreatic mass will be focused by the patient’s history and imaging characteristics of the lesion (solid versus cystic). This chapter outlines the various solid and cystic lesions of the pancreas emphasizing proper tissue triage and handling, cytological criteria, and a multimodal approach to diagnosis using clinical and imaging features, as well as ancillary pathological studies. The newly proposed Papanicolaou Society of Cytopathology terminology system for reporting pancreaticobiliary cytology is also discussed.

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Rosenbaum, M.W., Pitman, M.B. (2019). Pancreas. In: Domanski, H. (eds) Atlas of Fine Needle Aspiration Cytology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76980-6_12

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