Surgical gamma probe with TlBr semiconductor for identification of sentinel lymph node

Intraoperative gamma probes have been widely used in surgery oriented, to locate the sentinel lymph nodes in breast cancer and malignant melanoma during the surgery. In this work a surgical gamma probe using TlBr as crystal semiconductor detector was developed. The performance of the probe with a maximum sensitivity of 10 cps/kBq and 11 mm of spatial resolution in 10 mm depth shows that TlBr crystal is suitable to be used in a sentinel lymph node gamma probe. The final probe size 12.7 mm diameter, 170 mm long and the detection performance attend the necessary requirements to be used in radio oriented surgery.

I INTRODUCTION

Breast cancer is a major health concern in women and axillary lymph node status is the most important pathological determinant of the prognosis in early breast cancer. The sentinel lymph node is the first lymph node from which the tumour is drained and it becomes involved in metastasis from the tumour [1]. Then, it is required to be localized with relatively high resolution spatial (few mm), either at the pre-operative or intra-operative surgery stage. For this purpose, the radiooriented surgery technique has been used.