Statistical analysis

Demographic and clinicopathologic data are presented as the frequency and percentage, and average values are presented as the mean±standard deviation. The values for evaluating the efficacy of SLNB, including the identification rate, expected false-negative rate, concordance rate, and positive rate, are presented as percentages and were compared with corresponding data from previous meta-analyses [9,10,12]. The Student t-test was used to compare SUVmax values between the SLN-negative and SLN-positive groups. The correlation between negative SLNs and SUVmax was analyzed using Pearson correlation coefficients. In addition, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used for determining the SUVmax cutoff for unnecessary ALN assessment. A P-value <0.05 was considered statistically significant. Statistical analyses were performed using IBM SPSS Statistics version 25.0 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA).