Are lymph nodes with isolated tumor cells still considered node-negative?
Kristin Brill, M.D., F.A.C.S.: Lymph nodes that have small amounts of tumor cells can be challenging for the pathologist to identify, but with a special dye we can pick up very small metastatic deposits in lymph nodes. These small deposits are called isolated tumor cells. By staging these, they have their own notation and at this point we’re not certain if there’s clinical significance to these small deposits, meaning it’s hard to know if these truly represent positive lymph nodes. So at this point they’re still considered to be negative lymph nodes.
