Unnecessary surgical operation confirmed by individual identification by analyses of several short tandem repeat (STR) loci.

A 60-year-old man who was diagnosed as having hepatic cell carcinoma by needle punch biopsy from the liver, underwent right hepatic lobectomy. However, no malignant components were detected in the removed tissue. It was suspected that he was the wrong patient and had undergone the operation unnecessarily. Individual identification was performed using paraffin blocks of his liver tissue taken by needle punch biopsy, that of liver tissue taken at surgery and his peripheral blood by genotyping several STR loci. All of these specimens had the same genotypes. Histological re-examination revealed that the biopsied sample contained no malignant component. The end result was that the initial biopsied liver specimen was misdiagnosed as hepatic cancer and the patient underwent an unnecessary operation due to misdiagnosis.