Surgical margins in conservative surgery for breast cancer

Abstract

Conservative surgery is the actual gold standard for the management of low-stages (i.e. I and II) breast cancers. The completion of clear margins is a prerequisite for a complete local treatment and a decrease of local recurrences. A tight collaboration between pathologists and surgeons is mandatory. There is no consensus for the definition of the cut of a clear margin. Different management processes have been reported through the literature, ranging from gross management to cytologic or histopathologic methods for margin evaluation. Such approaches have to be correlated to the clinical and radiological setting. They have to be performed in line with tumor characteristics, and treatment plans. The perspectives are a better evaluation of surgical margins using nuclear medicine or molecular biology tools to decrease the number of second surgical procedures.