Indian doctors devise breast cancer test

NEW DELHI: In a major boost to breast cancer treatment in India, doctors at AIIMS and Tata Memorial Hospital have developed an indigenous technology to screen patients for a possible spread of a tumour. Sentinel node biopsy uses a cheaper dye — fluorescein — to map the spread of the tumour under ultraviolet light.
The mapping technique involves injecting a tracer material that helps a surgeon locate the sentinel nodes during surgery.“We have studied 40 breast cancer patients to assess the efficacy and safety of fluorescein as an alternative method when compared to the standard methods of radiotracers and blue dye, which are several times costlier,” said Dr Anurag Srivastava, the head of the surgery department at AIIMS. Overall, sentinel-node identification rate using the new technique was 97.5%. “False negative probability in this study was zero,” Srivastava said.
The mapping is the best way to find out if breast cancer cells have escaped the original tumour and spread to nearby lymph nodes in the armpit. It is performed as part of breast cancer surgery. “Only few government hospitals now have the mapping facility as the dye, sulphur colloid, is costly,” said a senior doctor.
Dr P K Julka, head of radiation oncology department at AIIMS, added, “We have recently started doing image-guided brachytherapy.”