[White lesions of the oral mucosa. Auxiliary diagnostic methods]

The purpose of this study was to assess the reliability of toluidine blue stain in determinating the biopsy site in 65 patients with red and white oral lesions. These patients were studied by comparing toluiding blue dye uptake clinically with a simultaneous biopsy. The microscopic analysis resulted in a false positive rate of 10.5% (previously we had established that the 6% were inflammatory lesions, always positive). We did not find false negatives. The reliability of the toluidine blue technique was 95.38%.