03009: Evaluating Accuracy for Identification of Sentinel Lymph Nodes in Dogs with Cutaneous MCT: A Comparison

One Health: Yes

Abstract

Mast cell tumors are the most common skin cancer in dogs, and they often spread to nearby lymph nodes (LNs). Finding evidence that cancer has spread to a LN is necessary to determine how much longer the dog will live and whether the dog will require systemic cancer treatment, such as chemotherapy, in addition to surgical removal of the tumor. Also, the removal of cancerous LNs at the time of the tumor excision allows dogs to live longer. Therefore, it is important to accurately identify which LNs are the most likely to contain cancerous cells. This study will assess the use of an affordable, advanced imaging system that has been used in published human studies and can be used for veterinary surgical oncology purposes to find potential LNs that mast cell tumors of the skin may have spread to in dogs. Investigators will compare this advanced imaging system (near-infrared fluorescence imaging, or NIRF) to an established imaging system that is used for this purpose but must be done before surgery (indirect computed tomography lymphography, or CTL). They will compare the LNs identified by these imaging systems to the LNs that are traditionally sampled by veterinarians without access to advanced imaging. Two sampling methods (cytology and histopathology) on both the identified and traditionally sampled LNs will be tested to compare how well these methods detect cancerous cells in these LNs. The findings from this study will reveal more about the nature of mast cell tumors and validate the use of NIRF for detecting the draining LNs.

Publication(s)

None at this time.