Breast cancer cure aims at complete elimination of malignant cells and essentially requires detection and treatment of any
micrometastases. Here, we present a review of the current methods in use and the potential role of the
quantum dots (QDs) in detection and visualization of sentinel lymph node and
micrometastases in
breast cancer patients. The traditional histopathological, immunohistochemical, and
reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction procedures being used for
micrometastases detection had serious drawbacks of high false negativity, specificity variations and false positivity of the results. Photon emission fluorescence multiplexing characteristics of the
quantum dots make them potentially ideal probes for studying the dynamics of cellular processes over time such as continuous tracking of cell migration, differentiation, and
metastases. In
breast cancer, QDs based molecular and genomic detections had an unparallel high sensitivity and specificity.