Current status of sentinel lymph node surgery for breast cancer.

Abstract

In 1997, Veronesi et al. ( 1 ) reported in the Lancet on their sentinel lymph node experience in a series of 163 patients with breast cancer. The day before surgery, a small volume of colloidal human albumin labeled with technetium 99m was injected subdermally over the tumor in these patients. Gamma camera imaging was performed, and a hand-held gamma probe was used to guide the surgical resection of the sentinel nodes (SNs). The use of blue dye was not reported. In 98% of the cases, at least one SN could be identified surgically. The false-negative rate (i.e., number of cases with negative SNs but positive non-SNs × 100/total number of cases with positive nodes) was 5%. The overall accuracy was 98%. Frozen section analysis had a higher false-negative rate of 36%.