Background: Artefacts are tissue alterations on a prepared microscopic slide due to external factors. Artefacts cause morphological and cytological alterations, which lead to misdiagnosis and result during biopsy procedures, particularly fixation artefacts due to inappropriate use/concentration of fixative agents, followed by artefacts during tissue processing, embedding, staining, sectioning, and poor handling of tissues. The present study aims to assess various histological artefacts encountered in our laboratory over four years. Materials and Methods: In this cross-sectional study, oral and maxillofacial histological slides prepared by haematoxylin and eosin staining were collected from the archives of our department from 2021 to 2024. A total of 3793 histopathological slides were evaluated. Two oral and maxillofacial pathologists evaluated the histopathological sections for the presence or absence of various artefacts. The results were tabulated in a Microsoft Excel sheet and were analysed descriptively. Result: The most common defect was folds in the sections, accounting for 34% of all samples (1,317 occurrences), with peaks in the years 2022 (363 cases) and 2023 (396 cases). Crush defects followed, noted in 14% of the samples (554 cases), with a notable rise in 2024 (198 cases). Conclusion: The study found that a large percentage of artefacts in histopathological sections were caused by technical or human faults. Folding artefact, which can cause tissues to become deformed and unclear, was reported to occur most frequently.
Muthumanickam et al. (Thu,) studied this question.