| Elastic scattering spectroscopy for detection of sentinel lymph node metastases in breast carcinoma (2005) | |||||||||
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Abstract | |||||||||
| Sentinel node biopsy is the new standard for lymphatic staging of breast carcinoma. Intraoperative detection of sentinel node metastases avoids a second operation for those patients with metastatic lymph nodes. Elastic scattering spectroscopy is an optical technique which is sensitive to cellular and subcellular changes occurring in malignancy. We analyzed 2078 ESS spectra from 324 axillary sentinel nodes from patients with breast carcinoma. ESS was able to detect metastatic lymph nodes with an overall sensitivity of 60% and specificity of 94%, which is comparable to existing pathological techniques. Nodes completely replaced with metastatic tumour were detected with 100% sensitivity, suggesting that further improvement in sensitivity is likely with more intensive optical sampling of the nodes. | |||||||||
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