Performance of lymph node cytopathology in diagnosis and characterization of lymphoma in dogs

Background: Cytopathology is a minimally invasive and convenient diagnostic procedure, often used as a substitute for histopathology to diagnose and characterize lymphoma in dogs. Objectives: Assess the diagnostic performance of cytopathology in diagnosing lymphoma and its histopathological subtypes in dogs. Animals: One-hundred and sixty-one lymph node samples from 139 dogs with enlarged peripheral lymph nodes. Methods: Based only on cytopathology, 6 examiners independently provided the following interpretations on each sample: (a) lymphoma vs nonlymphoma; (b) grade and phenotype; and (c) World Health Organization (WHO) histopathological subtype. Histopathology and immunohistochemistry (IHC) findings were used as reference standards to evaluate diagnostic performance of cytopathology. Clinical, clinicopathologic, and imaging data also were considered in the definitive diagnosis. Results: Classification accuracy for lymphoma consistently was >80% for all examiners, whereas it was >60% for low grade T-cell lymphomas, >30% for high grade B-cell lymphomas, >20% for high grade T-cell lymphomas, and