Frozen Section Diagnosis of Axillary Sentinel Lymph Nodes

Intraoperative pathologic examination of the sentinel lymph node (SLN) draining primary breast carcinoma allows a SLN-positive patient to undergo complete axillary lymphadenectomy as part of the same surgical procedure. We reviewed the results of frozen section examinations of sentinel lymph nodes from 87 patients performed in the year of 2004. Compared with H&E-stained paraffin sections, our frozen sections had an overall accuracy of 90%. The false negative rate was 10.4% and our sensitivity was 55%. Our results compare favorably to results of other institutions, as published in the literature.