Figure 1.

Artist depiction of technique for obtaining fresh nodal tissue from the sentinel lymph node for immunological analysis without compromising pathological analysis. The surrounding fat is removed from the sentinel lymph node and the node is sectioned into 2 mm gross sections. Each section is placed on a cryotome and a single shaving is removed from the top prior to freezing. This tissue is collected for immunological profiling. The remainder of the 2 mm section is then utilized for pathological analysis. On average there were four 2 mm sections processed resulting in four shavings from throughout the sentinel lymph node.