Axillary tumour burden in women with a fine-needle aspiration/core biopsy-proven positive node on ultrasonography compared to women with a positive sentinel node.

Patients with AUS-detected metastases had a higher axillary tumour burden than those with SNB-detected metastases. Around 40 per cent of patients with AUS-detected nodal disease had one or two nodes with macrometastases and were thus overtreated by ALND.