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Last updated: 02/17/2009
Sentinel lymph node biopsy has several purposes:
- Improving the accuracy of cancer staging. Cancer staging is a system that classifies malignant tumors according to the extent of their spread in the body. It is used to guide decisions about...
treatment. - Catching the spread of cancer to nearby lymph nodes as early as possible.
- Defining homogeneous patient populations for clinical trials of new cancer treatments.
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The sentinel lymph node is the hypothetical first lymph node or group of nodes reached by metastasizing cancer cells from a tumor.
The concept of the sentinel lymph node is important because of the advent of the sentinel lymph node biopsy technique, also known as a sentinel node procedure. This technique is used in the staging of certain types of cancer to see if they have spread to any lymph nodes, since lymph node metastasis is one of the most important prognostic signs.
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