About Cancer Treatments

Monitoring the lymphatic system and especially lymph nodes is a very efficient way of treating many types of cancers, as malignant cells use this network to spread throughout the patient's body. With freehand SPECT, SurgicEye provides a 3-D imaging solution that enables surgeons to localize a sentinel lymph node during operation thanks to a gamma camera and a touch screen. Freehand SPECT provides minimally invasive access to the lymph node as well as a seamless documentation of surgery. SurgicEye's technology currently promises the highest quality of operation outcome: it simply makes the invisible become visible in 3-D.

What is SLNB? / Procedure

Sentinel lymph node biopsy (SNLB) is a method used as a minimally invasive procedure to find the first nodes in the lymphatic system in the drain of the tumor as an indicator for precise tumor staging. The procedure of finding the sentinel lymph node is relying on one or any combination of the following procedures:

• Sentinel node imaging is usually done in the nuclear medicine department a day prior to or a few hours before the operation. A small amount of radioactive material is injected subcutaneously into the breast around the tumor. This material is carried by lymphatic vessels and accumulates in the sentinel nodes, which can be seen on a nuclear medicine scan (scintigram). The scan only shows the location of the sentinel lymph nodes. It does not show if they contain any tumor cells. The presence of tumor will be verified or excluded by a pathologist. This scintigraphy imaging is possible only directly before surgery. The image data has only limited validity during surgery due to deformation of the breast tumor and healthy tissue.
• Blue dye injection: the material is injected around the tumor in the operating room, directly before the incision. This dye stains the sentinel nodes in a blue color. The blue dye may be visible around the operation scar following surgery. Usually, the color fades only after a few weeks or months.
• Gamma probe detection: a hand-held probe guides the surgeon to radioactive deposits (SLNs). However, handheld probes do not offer direct access to the desired nodes, resulting in longer access paths and operation time. Thus, SLNB is important for both prognosis and therapy and should be performed routinely for patients with certain types of cancers such as breast cancer or Merkel cell carcinoma. In contrast, computed tomographic scans have poor sensitivity in detecting nodal disease as well as poor specificity in detecting distant disease.

Advantages of SurgicEye's declipseSPECT in SLNB

With freehand SPECT, SurgicEye offers 3-D data directly during surgery as well as a minimally invasive access to lymph nodes. This can facilitate smaller scars, less trauma/morbidity, and shorter operation time. Freehand SPECT is a new technology that is currently used in clinics in Europe aiming at combining all available data to ensure an optimal surgery outcome.