How is lymphoscintigraphy performed?

How is lymphoscintigraphy performed?

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...

The lymphoscintigraphy is performed based upon what type, what you are really doing. So I'll give you an example. If a patient with a melanoma skin lesion, the surgeon wants to know where does this lesion draining to, to what lymph node. The patient is basically prepared by cleaning the area of where the tumor is on the skin. And then we use syringes with very small needles. To inject the radio tracer. A small amount of radio tracer. Maybe up to, somewhere between one to three, or four millimeter. Depending on what the size of the tumor is, and where it is. Around the tumor. This is done with the needle inserted just next to the border of the lesion and the normal skin, just underneath the skin. And all the tracer is deposited at that location. And that's the end of it at that point. Then the patient is basically taken to the camera system and image is obtained from that area, and also seeing dynamically where the tracer is traveling to through the lymphatic channels. And the first accumulation of tracer that we see relates to where the lymph node is. And that area is basically found by putting a mark on the skin where that lymph node, where we think that that lymph node is. And then the patient is done with the study. And so some of these studies are done just prior to surgery. So the patient comes to the nuclear medicine lab, the lymphoscintigraphy is performed, and the patient moves on right from there to the operating room so that the surgeon can find where the node is and look at it.