The Augsburg consensus

SUMMARY The techniques of lymphatic mapping and sentinellymphadenectomy have been increasingly popular inthe 8 years since their introduction. 1 The techniqueswere initially developed for the management of pa-tients with cutaneous melanoma, but are now widelyapplied in breast carcinoma and are under investiga-tion in the management of other forms of cancer.Despite this wide enthusiasm there is little unanimityregarding the exact details of the technical steps thatare required for successful application of the ap-proach, and published guidelines remain few. Withthis in mind, a conference on sentinel lymphadenec-tomy in cutaneous malignancies was held in Augs-burg, Germany, in March 1999, following which agroup of individuals who had extensive experiencewith the approach convened a committee of expertsand was charged with developing a consensus on thetechniques necessary for the optimum application of theapproach. This article is the result of these deliberationsand provides detailed and practicable recommendationson patient selection, preoperative and intraoperative lo-calization of the SLNs, pathologic assessment of theSLNs, and the correct disposition of lymph node tissuesfor diagnostic and investigative purposes.