الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Pleural diseases involve parietal and visceral pleura and can be either of inflammatory or malignant origin, which often leads to pleural effusions. The diagnostic assessment of pleural effusions involves chemical and microbiological tests as well as cytological examination that can provide additional information on the phase of etiological disease. However, 40% of pleural effusions remain undiagnosed after an initial thoracocentesis.
An undiagnosed exudative pleural effusion is often a difficult diagnostic dilemma that needs further histological study for a definitive etiological diagnosis. Pleural biopsy is recommended for evaluation and determination of various etiologies either infectious or malignant ones.
Pleural biopsy is indicated to define the etiology of pleural diseases, the biopsy obtaining techniques are variable starting from the older ones such as blind pleural biopsy reaching the newer techniques such as image-guided pleural biopsy and thoracoscopy-guided pleural biopsy.
Pleural cryo-biopsy always had its limitations such as fear of bleeding due to large size of the biopsy and difficulty of acquiring biopsy in firmly adherent or thickened pleural membranes so the modified thoracoscopic cryo-biopsy technique was done in the current study to facilitate obtaining biopsy and to acquire a large sized biopsy without the fear of profound bleeding or pain.