Surgical biopsies

A surgical biopsy consists of removing, in the operating theatre, a fragment or the whole of a suspicious lesion in order to establish its exact nature. It is offered when simpler sampling — needle aspiration or image-guided biopsy — is impossible, insufficient or inconsistent with the images. Depending on the location, the procedure may be an excisional biopsy, which removes the whole lesion (lymph node, subcutaneous nodule, breast lesion), or an incisional biopsy, which takes only a representative fragment. Prior radiological localisation is sometimes performed to guide the surgeon precisely to a non-palpable lesion. At Clinique Pasteur Tunis, surgical biopsies are performed as day surgery in most cases, under appropriate anaesthesia. Pathological analysis of the samples is carried out, with the possibility of frozen-section examination during the procedure when the situation warrants it, and the results are passed on quickly to the doctor to organise the next stage of care.