Abstract
Atypia of undetermined significance (AUS) is a diagnostic category associated with a lower outcome of malignancy compared to the suspicious for malignancy (SFM) category in all reporting systems. This category includes cases with small numbers of cells that display some features of malignancy but that overlap with reactive changes. Processing artifact, degeneration, and inability to perform ancillary testing to further qualify atypical cells may result in assignment to this category. For peritoneal fluids, benign and borderline gynecologic tumor cells in fluid are also assigned to AUS, even once they are confirmed with ancillary studies, to categorically separate them from negative cases (without any tumor cells) and those that may be malignant. If the features closely approximate malignancy, SFM is the preferred category. In most cases, AUS is a category of last resort, and should be amended to a more specific category after ancillary testing.
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Vielh, P., Gerhard, R., Lozano, M., Suciu, V. (2020). Atypia of Undetermined Significance. In: Chandra, A., Crothers, B., Kurtycz, D., Schmitt, F. (eds) The International System for Serous Fluid Cytopathology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53908-5_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53908-5_4
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