Diagnosis of infection in hip and knee revision surgery: intraoperative frozen section analysis.

Unlabelled: In this study we validated intraoperatively the analysis of polymorphonuclear leucocyte frozen sections for diagnosis of infection in hip and knee revisions. Between 1996 and 2002 we examined sections and cultured periprosthetic tissues in prosthetic revision in 170 cases, including 146 cases (83 hips and 63 knees). We assessed sensitivity (SE), specificity (SP), positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV), Youden index, positive likelihood ratio (PLR) and negative likelihood ratio (NLR).