Minimally invasive surgery for breast cancer

Breast conservation surgery has become a standard operation as a minimally invasive surgery for breast cancer in Japan. Now sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB), day surgery, and endoscopy assisted surgery are being introduced as more minimally invasive surgeries for breast cancer. When blue dye and/or isotope are injected into the peri-tumoral breast gland, the sentinel lymph nodes (SLN) can be detected easily, and node negative patients can be selected with certainty. When no metastasis is found in SLN by frozen section, T1N0 breast cancer patients can be treated without lymph node dissection. Using this technique, day surgery for patients who have clinically node-negative small breast cancer (less than 1.5 cm in diameter) is performed under local anesthesia. We have developed an endoscopy assisted conservation surgery for breast cancer. Using endoscopy, partial or total glandectomy with radical axillary lymph node dissection is performed via a 5 cm skin incision on the middle axillary line. When the amount of glandectomy is over one third, we perform immediate reconstruction using the latissimus dorsi. These minimally invasive surgeries for breast cancer will result in a better quality of life for breast cancer patients.