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Updated: Jul 7, 2026
Hand-held Clinical Photoacoustic Imaging System for Real-time Non-invasive Small Animal Imaging
Published on: October 16, 2017
High-resolution, hand-held camera for sentinel-node detection
Francesco Scopinaro1, Anna Tofani, Gianpaolo di Santo
1Department of Radiological Sciences, La Sapienza University, Rome, Italy. francesco.scopinaro@uniroma1.it
Background:
The imaging probe (IP) is a high-resolution (HR), 1-in(2) field-of-view hand-held gamma camera. We used it to detect breast cancer sentinel node (SN).
Patients And Methods:
We divided 120 T1 breast cancer patients, who underwent Anger camera lymphoscintigraphy (ACL), in two subgroups of 60 patients who were age, body mass index, and cancer size matched: subgroup A (SA) and B (SB). SN was detected with a common gamma probe (GP) in SA, with IP plus GP in SB.
Results:
Surgeons removed radioactive nodes without exceeding four nodes. Eighty-two (82) SNs were taken off in SA and 105 in SB (p<0.01). Of SA, 22 of 60 patients and 36 of 60 patients of SB showed more than 1 node, and 3 of them showed 3 nodes and 1 showed 4 nodes. Thirteen (13) patients resulted N(+) (21.6%) in SA. Ten (10) patients of SA showed an invasion on the hottest nodes and 3 on the second nodes. In the SB, 18 patients (25%) showed invasion. Sixteen (16) invasions were on hot, 4 on second, and 1 on the third node. Withdrawal time of SN was 11.25+/-4.7 minutes for SA and 7.4+/-2.8 minutes for SB (p<0.025).
Conclusions:
SN biopsy with IP is fast and discovers more SNs and more invasions than ACL.
