Introduction

For endobronchial tumor lesions, flexible bronchoscopy is the gold standard technique to obtain material suitable for morphological diagnosis. It has been reported that endobronchial cryobiopsy has higher diagnostic yield compared to forceps biopsy. It remains unclear, if cryobiopsy also shortens time to diagnosis.

Aims

Our aim was to assess and compare the diagnostic yield, safety, rate of diagnostic failure and time to diagnosis of both procedures (endobronchial cryobiopsy vs forceps biopsy).

Methods

This was a retrospective study. We included all patients with visualized endobronchial tumor lesions that underwent diagnostic bronchoscopy between January 2018 and December 2020 at the Department of Respiratory Diseases, University Hospital Brno, Czech Republic. The Shapiro-Wilk test, Mann-Whitney U test and two-tailed Fisher exact test were used for statistical analyses, using the Statistica software 12.0 (StatSoft Inc., Prague, Czech Rep.). Data presented as median (IQR). P values <0.05 were considered statistically significant.

Results

Data of 330 patients were analyzed, of these, 61% underwent endobronchial cryobiopsy and 39% forceps biopsy. There were no differences in age, sex and BMI. Average number of biopsy samples was higher in the forceps group [6 (5-7) vs 4 (3-5); p<0.01], as was time to diagnosis [9 days (7-12) vs 8 (6-10); p<0.01] and rate of patients with diagnosis made after ?21 days (7% vs 2%; p=0.04). Similarly, repeated biopsy was more frequent in the forceps group (9% vs 2%; p<0.01), while rate of moderate/severe bleeding was comparable in both groups (p=0.12).

Conclusions

Endobronchial cryobiopsy shortens the time to histological diagnosis, while proves to be a safe and highly effective method.