The current trend in disease management of early stage endometrial (EC) and cervical cancer (CeC) patients is to reduce the extent of surgery by applying sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) instead of systematic lymphadenectomy.
SLNB enables intraoperative assessment of the nodal status by analysing a small number of lymph nodes. Existing methods using frozen sections lack sensitivity because only small parts of each SLN are examined, which risks missing small metastasis in other parts of the nodes. On the other side, more comprehensive serial sectioning is time-consuming and laborious, which is unsuitable in an intraoperative setting.
OSNA (one step nucleic acid amplification) is an optimal solution to overcome such limitations. OSNA is a rapid, highly sensitive and standardised molecular method which allows analysis of the entire SLN intraoperatively. This enables surgeons to have fully informed results so they can make immediate decisions on the most suitable surgical approach for a patient, to potentially reduce surgical radicality and to avoid unnecessary lymphadenectomies.
