The Accurate Interpretation and Clinical Significance of Morphological Features of Fine Needle Aspiration Cells in Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma

Figure 1

The morphological features of fine needle aspiration cells in PTC (Papanicolaou stain). (a) True papillary arrangements. The comprised of fibrovascular cores lined by neoplastic cells are seen in the conventional type of papillary thyroid carcinoma (smear, ×100). (b) Papillary-like arrangements. The cells are arranged into multi-level finger protrusions, there is no fibrovascular core in the protrusion, and the surface of the protrusion is smooth (smear, ×400). (c) Swirl arrangements. The figure shows a concentric aggregate composed of more than 100 tumor cells, the most peripheral cells are oval, and the long axis of the cells is perpendicular to the radius of the vortex. At the lower left corner of the vortex arrangement is a multinucleated giant cell (smear, ×400). (d) Escape arrangements. The arrow in the figure shows that a cell is separated from the original cell cluster, and there is obvious atypia at the edge of the follicular cell cluster. Its cytoplasm may still be partially continuous with the cell cluster (LBP, ×400). (e) The enlargement, elongation, contour irregularity, and molding of nuclear. The area or length of some nuclei is significantly more than 1.5 times that of same kind cells, several cells in the upper left corner show obvious nuclear contour irregularity, the rightmost arrow shows that the nucleus shows local molding (smear, ×400). (f) The crowding and overlap of nuclear. The distance between adjacent cells is significantly reduced, and even one nucleus covers another nucleus (smear, ×400). (g) INCIs and nuclear grooves are shown. Note that the two INCIs share the same aqua color and granular texture as the surrounding cytoplasm and that several peripheral cells show longitudinal nuclear sulcus (LBP, ×400). (h) Pale nuclei and nucleoli are shown. Close inspection at high magnification shows pale nuclei with powdery chromatin and micronucleoli edge set (LBP, ×400).

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