Introduction: fine-needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB) as a means of evaluation of palpable soft tissue lesions is poorly utilized in our environment despite the fact that it is safe, cheap, quick and easy to perform.

Methods: all cases of cases of palpable soft tissue lesions of the trunk and extremities where FNAB was used as the initial evaluation tool were reviewed. Furthermore, the records for corresponding cases that had open excision biopsy and ultimately had histologic diagnosis out of these cases were also retrieved and correlated with the final diagnosis from FNAB.

Results: out of 142 aspirates, only 107(75.3% of cases) fulfilled the inclusion criteria for the study. The age range was from 0-85 years (mean = 41.2 yrs.) with a roughly equal male:female ratio. The lesions were located in the trunk -56 cases, upper arm -7, forearm -1, hand -1, thigh -28, leg -7 and the foot-7. The FNAB was diagnosed as benign in 56 (52.3%) cases, malignant in 48 (44.8 %) cases, and suspicious of malignancy in 3(2.8%) cases. The cases were cytomorphologically classified into the following categories: Lipomatous (32 cases), epithelia (18), spindle cell (14), inflammatory (13) pleomorphic (11), small round (6), myxoid (5), epitheloid/ polygonal (1) and others (7). The sensitivity and specificity of diagnosed cases with FNAB as either benign or malignant when correlated with histology were 95% and 100% respectively.

Conclusion: FNAB is a valuable tool in the initial evaluation of palpable soft tissue lesions especially in primary soft tissue neoplasms and clinically suspected metastatic carcinomas.