TY  - JOUR
A1  - Diessner, Joachim
A1  - Anders, Laura
A1  - Herbert, Saskia
A1  - Kiesel, Matthias
A1  - Bley, Thorsten
A1  - Schlaiss, Tanja
A1  - Sauer, Stephanie
A1  - Wöckel, Achim
A1  - Bartmann, Catharina
T1  - Evaluation of different imaging modalities for axillary lymph node staging in breast cancer patients to provide a personalized and optimized therapy algorithm
JF  - Journal of Cancer Research and Clinical Oncology
N2  - Purpose
The reliable detection of tumor-infiltrated axillary lymph nodes for breast cancer [BC] patients plays a decisive role in further therapy. We aimed to find out whether cross-sectional imaging techniques could improve sensitivity for pretherapeutic axillary staging in nodal-positive BC patients compared to conventional imaging such as mammography and sonography.

Methods
Data for breast cancer patients with tumor-infiltrated axillary lymph nodes having received surgery between 2014 and 2020 were included in this study.
All examinations (sonography, mammography, computed tomography [CT] and magnetic resonance imaging [MRI]) were interpreted by board-certified specialists in radiology. The sensitivity of different imaging modalities was calculated, and binary logistic regression analyses were performed to detect variables influencing the detection of positive lymph nodes.

Results
All included 382 breast cancer patients had received conventional imaging, while 52.61% of the patients had received cross-sectional imaging.
The sensitivity of the combination of all imaging modalities was 68.89%. The combination of MRI and CT showed 63.83% and the combination of sonography and mammography showed 36.11% sensitivity.

Conclusion
We could demonstrate that cross-sectional imaging can improve the sensitivity of the detection of tumor-infiltrated axillary lymph nodes in breast cancer patients. Only the safe detection of these lymph nodes at the time of diagnosis enables the evaluation of the response to neoadjuvant therapy, thereby allowing access to prognosis and improving new post-neoadjuvant therapies.
KW  - breast cancer imaging
KW  - positive nodal status
KW  - cross-sectional imaging
KW  - conventional imaging
KW  - post-neoadjuvant therapies
KW  - neoadjuvant therapies
Y1  - 2023
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-324047
VL  - 149
IS  - 7
ER  -