138 Toda et al. the upper electrode by giving the electric field a positive polarity, a wave is generated, and the stirring phenomenon is caused by changes in the surface of this wave. We speculate that this stirring promotes the antigen-antibody reaction. Although the main purpose of the ultra-rapid IHC is the diagnosis of sentinel node micrometastasis during the surgery, avoiding axillary lymph node dissection based on the results of sentinel node biopsy is now controversial in breast cancer. Recently, the American College of Surgeons Oncology Group Z0011 trial demonstrated that, among patients with limited sentinel node metastatic breast cancer, the use of sentinel node dissection alone did not result in inferior survival, as compared to axillary lymph node dissec- tion [8]. This result indicates that intraoperative diagnosis of sentinel node micrometastasis may not be required, at least in breast cancer. We speculate that the reason for this is that radiation, chemotherapy, and endocrine therapy are more effective with breast cancer than with cancers in other organs. Unfortunately, radiation and chemotherapy are not particularly effective in NSCLC. In addition, Ou and Zell demonstrated that the number of lymph nodes removed at surgery in patients without apparent lymph node metastasis is a significant prognostic factor in NSCLC [21]. Further- more, mediastinal lymph node dissection is still the standard surgical procedure for patients with NSCLC. Therefore, lymph node micrometastasis should not be ignored when applying sentinel node mapping to NSCLC. In conclusion, we were able to demonstrate the useful- ness of our new method of AC electric field IHC analysis. However, the method was only tested using a single anti- body in a limited number of experiments. Further investiga- tion using other antibodies in larger clinical studies will be needed to confirm the utility of this method. 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