Abstrait

Artifacts in Histopathology: A Potential Cause of Misinterpretation.

Samar Khan, Manisha Tijare, Megha Jain, and Ami Desai

The intra-operative histological assessment of fresh tissue can provide valuable diagnostic information and guide surgical management. Artifacts in histopathology, could create serious errors and cause misdiagnosis. In some cases, the degree of artifactural damage is so large that may involve the entire specimen, rendering it suboptimal or useless for diagnostic purposes. Biopsy specimens of oral cavity are of small size and fine texture resulting into higher effectiveness of artifacts on them. Some artefacts are easily distinguished from normal or pathological tissue components, and some are difficult to distinguish from such entities. Artefacts may encounter at various stages which include during routine collection of tissues, fixation, processing, cutting and staining of tissues. This review encorporates all artifacts occurs during each stage of histopathological processing of tissues, in an attempt to identify the artifacts, their causative factors and appearance histopathologically so to differentiate them from that of pathological entitiy.