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Updated: Apr 6, 2026
Establishment of a Clinic-based Biorepository
Published on: May 29, 2017
A template for a clinico-pathological audit of medical liver biopsies
Richard Colling1, Eve Fryer1, Jeremy Cobbold2
1Department of Cellular Pathology, Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust, John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, UK.
Aims:
With changing indications for performing medical liver biopsies, we aimed to develop a tool to allow pathologists to evaluate the current usefulness, value and impact of their medical liver biopsy service.
Methods:
We designed and piloted a questionnaire-based clinico-pathological audit for medical liver biopsies.
Results:
The audit tool was simple to implement and provided useful information about our service. Hepatologists felt that 96% of reports were clinically useful. 56% of biopsies confirmed clinical diagnoses, 46% helped differentiate between diagnoses and 42% were able to exclude possible diagnoses. 74% resulted in a change of management and 27% of liver biopsies resulted in a diagnosis which was not clinically suspected.
Conclusions:
We demonstrate the usefulness of an audit tool in providing evidence of the value of the liver pathology service in a large UK regional centre.
