How is lymphoscintigraphy most commonly used?

How is lymphoscintigraphy most commonly used?

Hossein Jadvar (Doctor) gives expert video advice on: What are the benefits of lymphoscintigraphy?; What are the risks of lymphoscintigraphy?; What will I experience during lymphoscintigraphy? and more...

Today the most common use for lymphoscintigraphy is with the two types of cancers, melanoma and breast cancer, in nuclear medicine. What we do is that we inject a small amount of radioactive, radio tracer, around the tumor or in some specific locations -- for example around the areola in breast cancer, and we watch and see where this radio tracer travels to through the lymphatic channel and they collect eventually at some node. And that node is important, what we call the sentinel lymph node, that is the first draining node from that area of the tumor and that node is used by the surgeon for example to see if that node is involved with cancer or not. If it is involved with cancer the therapy is different from the time that it is not involved with cancer. So, in a way it's useful for a stage four.