Innovation in early breast cancer surgery: radio-guided occult lesion localization and sentinel node biopsy

The surgical management of non-palpable breast lesions remains controversial. At the European Institute of Oncology we have introduced a new technique, radio-guided occult lesion localization (ROLL) to replace standard methods and overcome their disadvantages. Regarding axillary dissection, probe-guided biopsy of the sentinel node (SN) is easy to apply, and the whole procedure is associated to a low risk of false negatives. We suggest that the SN technique should be widely adopted to stage the axilla in patients with breast cancer with clinically negative lymph nodes. Large-scale implementation of the sentinel node technique will reduce the cost of treatment as a result of shorter hospitalization times.