Poor Concordance of Transbronchial Lung Cryobiopsy and Surgical Lung Biopsy in ILDs

What is it about?

Although surgical lung biopsy still represents the gold standard for lung histology in those interstitial lung disease cases where histology is requested at multidisciplinary assessment, several publications suggest the alternative option of transbronchial lung cryobiopsy as a less-dangerous, quasi-equivalent substitute for surgical lung biopsy. By performing the two techniques sequentially in the same patients, we demonstrate that their diagnostic concordance is poor.

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Why is it important?

We compared for the 1st time the 2 procedures for obtaining lung histology in ILDs - Transbronchial Lung Cryobiopsy and Surgical Lung Biopsy - demonstrating a poor concordance between them, which has the potential to affect therapeutic decisions. Lung histology obtained by surgical lung biopsy was found to be more often concordant with the final diagnosis retained at multidisciplinary assessment. Surgical lung biopsy remains the biopsy technique of choice when histology is required for the differential diagnosis of diffuse interstitial lung diseases.