Automated and rapid detection of cancer in suspicious axillary lymph nodes in patients with breast cancer

Juanjuan Li, Bradley M. Downs, Leslie M. Cope, Mary Jo Fackler, Xiuyun Zhang, Chuan gui Song, Christopher VandenBussche, Kejing Zhang, Yong Han, Yufei Liu, Suzana Tulac, Neesha Venkatesan, Timothy de Guzman, Chuang Chen, Edwin W. Lai, Jingping Yuan, Saraswati Sukumar

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Preoperative staging of suspicious axillary lymph nodes (ALNs) allows patients to be triaged to ALN dissection or to sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB). Ultrasound-guided fine needle aspiration (FNA) and cytology of ALN is moderately sensitive but its clinical utility relies heavily on the cytologist’s experience. We proposed that the 5-h automated GeneXpert system-based prototype breast cancer detection assay (BCDA) that quantitatively measures DNA methylation in ten tumor-specific gene markers could provide a facile, accurate test for detecting cancer in FNA of enlarged lymph nodes. We validated the assay in ALN-FNA samples from a prospective study of patients (N = 230) undergoing SLNB. In a blinded analysis of 218 evaluable LN-FNAs from 108 malignant and 110 benign LNs by histology, BCDA displayed a sensitivity of 90.7% and specificity of 99.1%, achieving an area under the ROC curve, AUC of 0.958 (95% CI: 0.928–0.989; P < 0.0001). Next, we conducted a study of archival FNAs of ipsilateral palpable LNs (malignant, N = 72, benign, N = 53 by cytology) collected in the outpatient setting prior to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC). Using the ROC-threshold determined in the prospective study, compared to cytology, BCDA achieved a sensitivity of 94.4% and a specificity of 92.5% with a ROC-AUC = 0.977 (95% CI: 0.953–1.000; P < 0.0001). Our study shows that the automated assay detects cancer in suspicious lymph nodes with a high level of accuracy within 5 h. This cancer detection assay, scalable for analysis to scores of LN FNAs, could assist in determining eligibility of patients to different treatment regimens.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number89
Journalnpj Breast Cancer
Volume7
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2021

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Oncology
  • Radiology Nuclear Medicine and imaging
  • Pharmacology (medical)

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