Correlative studies on cytological and histopathological diagnosis of spontaneous canine skin tumours

The present study was aimed to evaluate the correlation between cytological and histopathological techniques in diagnosis of canine skin tumours. A total of 66 cytological and histopathologic specimens were collected from dogs suspected for the tumorous growths. Cytologically, 55/66 cases were diagnosed as neoplasms, while 52/66 cases were confirmed as neoplastic growths by histopathology. As histology is gold standard for tumour diagnosis, cytological diagnosis showed 94.54% true positive and 5.46% false positives cases. True positive cases included 38 epithelial tumours, 3 mesenchymal tumours and 11 round cell tumours. Nine cases diagnosed non-neoplastic in cytology were confirmed by histopathology as true negative, however, two cases were found to be false negative. Sensitivity and specificity of cytological diagnosis was found to be 96.29% and 75%, respectively, which indicated that cytological method can provide an early insight to diagnosis of skin tumours in canine.