Surgical Treatment of Cancer

Since the introduction of the radioguided sentinel lymph node biopsy method (RGSLNB) in 1990 this practice has become the standard in surgical treatment of cancer especially breast carcinoma and melanoma, but also in many other surgical cancer treatments. Besides radioguided sentinel lymph node biopsy there are lots of clinical applications of radioguided surgery (RGS) using gamma detection probes, e.g. radioguided occult lesion localization (ROLL), radioguided intraoperative margins evaluation (RIME), radioimmunoguided surgery (RIGS) and 18F-FDG directed surgery (FDGDS).

Our versatile gamma probe system Crystal Probe -automatic- with a large variety of probes with outstanding sensitivity and excellent side shielding allows an optimal usage for all current and future applications of radioguided surgery.

Coming soon: the hand-held gamma camera Crystal Cam for the visualization of the location of the sentinel nodes before surgery (“sentinel lymph node mapping”): characterized by extremely short imaging times our hand-held gamma camera Crystal Cam will be able to deliver an idea of the distribution of lymph nodes prior to surgery - directly on patients, very quickly and from all directions.

Please check the table below. It provides a good overview, in which operative cancer therapies gamma probes are already used or were used in the context of different applications of the radioguided surgery. The table doesn’t claim to be complete (for example, the combination of ROLL and SLNB - SNOLL- is missing):

(Source: Povoski et al. World Journal of Surgical Oncology 2009 7:11 doi:10.1186/1477-7819-7-11). You can find the whole article here.)

Clinical applications of radioguided surgery using gamma detection probe technology

(RGSLNB - radioguided sentinel lymph node biopsy; ROLL - radioguided occult lesion localization; RIME - radioguided intraoperative margins evaluation; RIGS - radioimmunoguided surgery; FDGDS - 18F-FDG directed surgery)

(P) 2012-01-12-A