What are the benefits of lymphoscintigraphy?

What are the benefits of lymphoscintigraphy?

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 benefits of lymphoscintigraphy is again very large because we are able to prevent a lot of unnecessary procedures, surgical procedures, or treatments even by mapping out what the drainage pattern of a tumor is. For example in the past, breast cancer patients under went axillary dissection, by that means that they take a good number of nodes. The surgeon takes a good number of nodes out of the axilla on the side of the breast cancer. And that has a lot of complications, up to thirty percent of patients can develop bad complications in relation to obstruction of emphatics, pain, diminished motion of the arm. But now with lymphoscintigraphy we are able to "stage" the axilla until, so that the surgeon can know if there is in fact tumor in the axilla or not by just looking at that central lymph node and that node among all the nodes in the axilla is identified clearly by doing a lymphoscintigraphy. So the benefit is basically, to avert a lot of unnecessary axillary dissections, a lot of pain and suffering and expense.