Touch Imprint Cytology and Frozen-section Analysis for Intraoperative Evaluation of Sentinel Nodes in Early Breast Cancer
Anticancer Research, 07/27/2012
Lumachi F et al. – The preliminary data confirm that imprint cytology (IC) is a simple and rapid technique with good sensitivity, suggesting that the combination of frozen–section (FS) and IC may be useful in all patients requiring intraoperative Sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) evaluation.
Methods- A series of 126 consecutive women (median age 52, range 34-71years) with T1 (≤20mm) BC, were prospectively enrolled in the study.
- A total of 221 axillary nodes were processed for both IC and FS intraoperative evaluation.
- Final pathology revealed 74 out of 221 (33.5%) nodes with metastasis, out of which 51 (68.9%) had macrometastases.
- Overall, 31 out of 126 (24.6%) patients were staged as having pN1mi or pN1a.
- The sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy in detecting metastases were 75.7%, 100% and 91.9% for FS, 70.3%, 98.6% and 89.1% for IC, and 89.2%, 100% and 96.0% for IC+FS together, respectively.
- The sensitivity of FS and IC did not differ significantly (p=0.46), while the combination of FS+IC showed a higher sensitivity (p=0.03), and similar accuracy.
