Intraoperative consultation (IOC) on pathologic specimens, or frozen section in common parlance, is a great boon to the operating surgeon. Immediate information can be made available for the surgical team to guide decision making, such as determining whether to embark on further debridement of a potential necrotizing soft-tissue infection, assessing future clinical consequences, and, most commonly, deciding whether to resect additional tissue. It is in this context that the article by McAuliffe et al¹ should be read. The authors present a broad analysis of their institutional experience with gastric and gastroesophageal adenocarcinoma during a 23-year period and including a final cohort of 2002 patients in whom IOC by a pathologist was used. They found an overall diagnostic accuracy for IOC of 98.1%, with a false-negative (FN) rate of 1.7%. They also found that signet ring cell and diffuse-type final diagnoses had higher rates of FN results, ranging as high as 4.7% for those who did not undergo neoadjuvant radiotherapy. These findings are representative of the challenges that face cancer surgeons seeking intraoperative pathologic information.

对病理标本进行术中咨询（IOC）或通常所说的冷冻切片，对手术外科医生是一个很大的福音。可以为外科团队提供即时信息，以指导决策，例如确定是否对潜在的坏死性软组织感染进行进一步的清创术，评估未来的临床后果，以及最常见的是决定是否切除其他组织。正是在这种情况下，McAuliffe等人的文章¹应该阅读。作者对他们在23年期间在胃和胃食管腺癌中的机构经验进行了广泛的分析，其中包括2002年最后一批队列，其中使用了病理学家的IOC。他们发现IOC的整体诊断准确性为98.1％，假阴性（FN）率为1.7％。他们还发现，印戒细胞和弥漫型最终诊断的FN结果率更高，对于未接受新辅助放疗的患者，其结果高达4.7％。这些发现代表了癌症外科医生寻求术中病理信息所面临的挑战。