Sentinel lymph node (SLN) biopsy has increasingly become important in axillary staging of
breast cancer patients since SLN biopsy alleviates the postoperative complications of
previously practiced axillary lymph node dissections. Nevertheless, the procedures of SLN
biopsy using blue dye and radioactive substance are still intraoperative, and the latter
methods are also ionizing. In this pilot study, we have proposed noninvasive in vivo
spectroscopic photoacoustic (PA) SLN mapping using gold nanorods as lymph node tracers …