Intelligent Vacuum Assisted Biopsy Immediately Before Surgery As an Intra- or Pre-Operative Surrogate for Patient Response to Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy for Breast Cancer

Neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC), initially indicated to downstage tumors to achieve the option of breast conserving surgery, has lately become common practice in the primary treatment of breast cancer. The use of modern NAC regimens lead to a complete pathologic remission (pCR) of the tumor in more than 50% in aggressive tumor types. In general, it is difficult to predict pCR in the absence of invasive surgical techniques, as it depends on several factors such as biological subtype, the used chemotherapy regimen and anatomic stage. The most common imaging methods beside clinical examination are breast ultrasound, mammography and breast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). As NAC induces different response patterns, radiologic imaging is not sufficiently accurate in predicting residual disease. Because of this uncertainty, surgery (and the standardized assessment of resected tissue) is so far the only valid option to either ascertain complete response or to remove the complete residual disease. Vacuum-assisted biopsy (VAB) with the possibility of obtaining tissue of the former tumor center could contribute more reliably to detect any residual tumor or respectively, rule out residual disease. Ultrasound (US) or mammographically (MG) guided VAB will be used in this trial in order to detect residual tumor lesions in patients with radiological complete response (rCR) after NAC. The investigators will evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of the post-NAC VAB sample in comparison to the sample obtained in open surgery. The main objective of the trial is to determine the diagnostic accuracy of I-VAB using the full pathologic specimen evalutation obtained after open surgery to detect residual tissue.