Diagnostic Accuracy of Fine Needle Aspiration Cytology (FNAC) in Salivary Gland Lesions with Histopathological Examination (HPE) Correlation in a Tertiary Care Centre in Southern India

This study aimed to determine the diagnostic yield of fine-needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) in salivary gland lesions compared to histopathological diagnosis. The present study was done on patients above 18 years of age, with a palpable swelling, who are clinically diagnosed as salivary gland lesions were evaluated. A total of 31 patients were evaluated in this study. The mean age of the patients was 41 years ± 16.08. The male to female ratio of patients evaluated in our study was 1: 1.066, with a marginal preponderance in the female population. There was a higher incidence of carcinoma in females than males. Parotid gland lesions comprised 83.9% of all the salivary gland lesions analyzed, while submandibular gland lesions comprised 16.1%. In our study, the distribution between non-neoplastic, neoplastic benign, and neoplastic malignant lesions was 9.6%, 83.8%, and 6.4%. The overall diagnostic accuracy for non-neoplastic and neoplastic lesions is 90.3%, with a sensitivity of 89% and a specificity of 100%. The segregation of the results into the positive and negative class of diagnostic outcomes shows 80.6% for true positive, 9.7% for true negative, 0% for false-positive, and 9.7% for false-negative reports. Diagnostic accuracy in differentiating non-neoplastic and neoplastic lesions is 90.3%, with a sensitivity and specificity of 89.0% and 100%, respectively. The diagnostic accuracy of FNAC in differentiating benign from malignant lesions in our study is 93.5% (29 out of 31), the sensitivity of FNAC in our study for diagnosing malignancy is poor, and the specificity is 100%. It can be concluded that FNAC is more accurate in diagnosing benign lesions and more specific than sensitive in diagnosing malignant lesions.