- Poster presentation
- Open Access
- Published:
Audit of accuracy of ultrasound-guided axillary core biopsy
Breast Cancer Research volume 13, Article number: P22 (2011)
Introduction
Sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) is the preferred method of axillary staging in breast cancer. If metastases are detected, axillary node clearance (ANC) is necessary. Preoperative detection of nodal metastases using ultrasound-guided core biopsy (USCB) allows the surgeon to proceed directly to ANC. Negative CBs do not exclude metastases. All patients still need SLNB. However, by minimising false negatives, unnecessary SLNBs can be minimised. We compared our USCB results with the results of subsequent SLNB + axillary node sampling (ANS) or ANC to assess our accuracy.
Methods
We performed a retrospective audit of patients having USCB in primary breast cancer. We included patients presenting to one consultant radiologist firm from our unit's symptomatic breast clinic between 27 March 2007 and 7 December 2010. Our criteria for CB included cortical thickness >2 mm, loss of fatty hilum and longitudinal axis/transverse axis <2. We used a 14G Achieve needle to make four passes into the node.
Results
Out of 41 CBs, on histology, eight were negative and 33 were positive. All positives were proven to be true positive at ANC. Seven out of eight negatives were found to be true negative (87.5% true negative) at SNB and ANS. One out of eight negative CBs was found to be false negative (12.5% false negative) requiring axillary clearance.
Conclusion
We found that our results were comparable with published recent studies from the UK and abroad. Aggressive and more focused sampling could be suggested to further reduce false negatives.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
About this article
Cite this article
Anand, A., Henderson, R. Audit of accuracy of ultrasound-guided axillary core biopsy. Breast Cancer Res 13 (Suppl 1), P22 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1186/bcr2974
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/bcr2974
Keywords
- Breast Cancer
- Nodal Metastasis
- False Negative
- Sentinel Lymph Node Biopsy
- Cortical Thickness