Relevance of intraoperative frozen section diagnostics in urological surgery

Intraoperative frozen section diagnosis (FSD) plays an important role in urological surgery. The surgeon obtains information on suspicious tissue and can adapt his strategy for the operation, thus sparing the patient from a second intervention. Most important for a successful FSD is close co-operation between the urologist and an experienced pathologist. Avery reliable assessment of urological tissues can be made with the help of FSD. The same applies for the margin status of tumours, which is most important for example in renal tumour enucleation to achieve the same oncological result as with a radical tumour nephrectomy. For the diagnosis of lymph nodes the indication for FSD depends on the urological primary lesion. Especially for prostate cancers some authors rather recommend the evaluation of the nodal status according to nomograms. FSD for "sentinel nodes" is promising but has not yet found its way into routine diagnostics.