Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women. For early-stage breast cancers, breast-conserving surgery (BCS) is applied to excise the tumor while saving surrounding healthy tissue as much as possible to avoid radical excisions and achieve better aesthetic and psychological outcomes for the patient. This surgical approach requires postoperative tumor-free margin assessment of the surgical resection in order to carry on with next steps of the patient care treatment (e.g. radiotherapy). Unfortunately, at least 20% of patient undergo more than one procedure to achieve acceptable margin status due to difficulties to identify subclinical and deep-seated tumor during BCS. During the surgery, the surgeon mainly relies on nonspecific visual changes and manual palpation of subtle irregularities to guide cancer excision. While these determinants enable bulk tumor assessment, they do not offer the information to adequately identify tumor infiltrates on lumpectomy margin.
An efficient intraoperative assessment of the margin may solve these issues and confocal imaging has shown some promises by providing real-time imaging of fresh tissue with the resolution sufficient to visualize microscopic tissue features. The Histolog Scanner is a recent confocal microscope designed for clinical use on large surgical specimens.
The main objective of this study is to confirm that the use of the Histolog Scanner by surgeons allows to detect breast cancer on lumpectomy margins and compare the performance of the detection with local standard-of-care intraoperative imaging techniques (ultrasound and radiography) using the final assessment performed in pathology as reference.
