Disposable soft tissue biopsy needles can be divided into three categories

(1) Preoperative biopsy

Biopsies are performed before therapeutic surgery or before other treatments, such as radiation and chemotherapy. Generally, a small part of the pathological tissue is taken (for example, if the lesion is small and located on the body surface, the lesion is usually taken completely) and sent for pathological biopsy, which is fixed by formaldehyde, paraffin embedding, section and HE staining. It takes 3-7 days to send a diagnostic report. The purpose of this study is to make the diagnosis clear so that the appropriate surgical or other therapeutic measures can be taken at the clinical stage. Such biopsies are mostly carried out in the outpatient department, and only small pieces of tissue are taken, so they are also called "small biopsies" or "outpatient small wood". In recent years, the materials taken by endoscopic forceps for some internal organs are more typical ultra-small biopsies, such as gastric mucosal lesions taken by gastroscope and pulmonary lesions taken by fiberbronchoscope, so as to confirm whether it is cancer or not, and then undergo surgery and other treatments.

The advantage of this kind of preoperative biopsy is that it is less traumatic and can generally be done in the outpatient department. Most of them can help the clinical diagnosis and make the clinical treatment plan have the exact basis for the next step. Its disadvantage is: some deep in the site of the lesion is difficult to draw; Small biopsies should be avoided for the few lesions that cause bleeding or spread; The sampling is not standard or the lesion is not obtained, easy to cause diagnosis difficulties or missed diagnosis; The patient and the clinic have to wait a long time (more than three days) for a diagnosis report, so it is not applicable to those who need a definitive diagnosis.

(2) Intraoperative biopsy

This is a biopsy done during therapeutic or exploratory surgery, usually within 20 to 30 minutes to make a qualitative diagnosis to guide how the surgery should be performed. The most commonly used technique is rapid freezing and sectioning, in which unfixed fresh specimens are rapidly frozen to below -18 ℃ for sectioning and HE staining for observation and diagnosis. Also known as "intraoperative freezing," "rapid freezing," or "frozen sectioning," rapid paraffin sectioning or cytology techniques are sometimes used.