Small field of view, high-resolution, portable γ-camera for axillary sentinel node detection

Sentinel node (SN) biopsy is an established method for breast cancer staging. Many authors suggested lymphoscintigraphy (LS) in order to indicate the sentinel node; others adopted the vital dye method together with radiocolloids, but only with γ-probe detection during operation without preliminary Anger camera LS. The second method is more simple and fast when compared with LS plus radioguided surgery. The Imaging Probe (IP) is a portable, hand held, high-resolution mini γ-camera studied by our group since 1998. Initial studies on sentinel node biopsy were carried out by us with IP on small series of patients to validate and to demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of IP against conventional probes. The aim of the present study is to show that surgeon removes the mammary sentinel node quicker and safer when using IP and conventional γ-probe together than conventional probe only. The results of our study not only show that our device makes quicker and safer SN biopsy, but also that the number of detected nodes is larger with our method than with conventional diagnostic and surgical techniques.