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

Abstract

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 paper, a surgical gamma probe using TlBr as a 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 the TlBr crystal is suitable to be used in a sentinel lymph node gamma probe. The final probe size was 12.7 mm diameter, 170 mm long and the detection performance met the necessary requirements to be used in radioguided surgery.