One-step nucleic acid amplification for intraoperative diagnosis of lymph node metastasis in lung cancer patients: a single-center prospective study

One-step nucleic acid amplification (OSNA) is a rapid intraoperative molecular detection technique for sentinel node assessment via the quantitative measurement of target cytokeratin 19 (CK19) mRNA to determine the presence of metastasis. It has been validated in breast cancer but its application in lung cancer has not been adequately investigated. 214 LNs from 105 patients with 100 primary lung cancers, 2 occult primary lung tumors, and 3 metastatic lung tumors, who underwent surgical lung resection with LN dissection between February 2018 and January 2020, were assessed. Resected LNs were divided into two parts: one was snap-frozen for OSNA and the other underwent rapidly frozen histological examination. Intraoperatively collected LNs were evaluated by OSNA using loop-mediated isothermal amplification and compared with intraoperative pathological diagnosis as a control. Among 214 LNs, 14 were detected as positive by OSNA, and 11 were positive by both OSNA and intraoperative pathological diagnosis. The sensitivity and specificity of OSNA was 84.6% and 98.5%, respectively. The results of 5 of 214 LNs were discordant, and the remainder all matched (11 positive and 198 negative) with a concordance rate of 97.7%. Although the analysis of public mRNA expression data from cBioPortal showed that CK19 expression varies greatly depending on the cancer type and histological subtype, the results of the five cases, except for primary lung cancer, were consistent. OSNA provides sufficient diagnostic accuracy and speed and can be applied to the intraoperative diagnosis of LN metastasis for non-small cell lung cancer.

Automated summary

This study demonstrates that the one-step nucleic acid amplification (OSNA) technique can be applied for intraoperative lymph node metastasis diagnosis in non-small cell lung cancer, with high sensitivity and specificity.