Utility of Modified Ultrafast Papanicolaou Stain in Cytological Diagnosis

Abstract

MUFP is fast, reliable and can be done with locally available reagents with unequivocal morphology which is the need of the hour for a cytopathology set-up.

‘Ease of interpretation’ of cytological smears stained with modified ultrafast papanicolaou stain: Interobserver agreement and reproducibility

“…The colloid appeared pale and non‐descript than in other stains (Figure ). However in ‘scoring’ systems, the smears devoid of important background material would have been given a ‘better’/'clean’ score in rest of the studies . Similar to previous observations by Shinde et al, the omission of OG‐6 in UF‐PAP lead to poor visualisation of intracellular keratin in a metastatic squamous cell carcinoma, which led to the stain being rated as ‘worse’ by both pathologists in terms of cell morphology against all the routine stains (Figure ).…”

“…More so when it concerns the quality and preferred stains for relative ‘ease’ of interpretation. Many recent papers on the utility of MUFPAP stains in cytological laboratory have attempted to objectify the assessment of the MUFPAP stained smears by means of assigning ‘quality scores’ or ‘quality index’ and evaluation by the same or independent pathologists . Every assessed parameter (‘background, nuclear staining, cell morphology, and overall staining’) was given an arbitrary ‘score’ and the quality ‘index was calculated.…”

“…Choudhary et al and Sinkar et al performed comparative studies by adopting the ‘scoring’ as proposed by Shinde et al and compared the scores with rapid and conventional papanicolaou stains on FNACs respectively. They demonstrated higher ‘quality index’ for UFPAP stained smears when compared to the routine pap counterparts.…”

“…The author reported promising results in his pilot study on breast aspirates and further on cytological smears from various organs . Since then, other authors have modified Kamal et al's modification, i.e., replacing Gill's Hematoxylin with Harris hematoxylin and these modifications have been tested on various cytological preparations …”

“…While the initial studies reported the features of the UF pap stain in a ‘descriptive’ fashion, various relatively ‘objective’ criteria including ‘diagnostic agreement’, ‘quality scores’, and ‘quality indices’ were introduced in studies published later on for comparisons with the other well‐standardized stains used in cytology . All these studies reported a superior performance of UF pap stain notwithstanding various modifications and settings.…”