Figure 1. Randomization and Results of Evaluation for Occult Metastases.
The patients who underwent sentinel-lymph-node (SLN) biopsy plus axillary dissection and the patients who underwent SLN biopsy alone were combined into two analytic cohorts: patients in whom occult metastases were detected and patients in whom occult metastases were not detected. The categories for metastasis size (isolated tumor-cell clusters, micrometastases, and macrometastases) were used for subgroup analysis.
