Surgeons have been found to be effective at carrying out a form of breast cancer treatment, according to a new study.
They were asked to perform a sentinel lymph node resection and 96.9 per cent of the 224 surgeons tested by the team from the University of Vermont performed the surgery successfully.
The research was carried out by Dr David Krag, who won the James E Demeules Surgical Research Award in 2004, and his team in order to check the success rate of three different types of training, but no huge difference was found.
"Subgroup analysis identified some variation in false-negative rates that were related to audited outcome performance measures, indicating the value of similar auditing measures on future trials," wrote the authors in their report, which appears in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
The sentinel lymph node resection is a surgical procedure which aims to maximise breast cancer survival with fewer side effects than other available surgery.