Current standards in oncoplastic breast conserving surgery

Oncoplastic breast conserving surgery is increasingly used to treat patients with breast cancer. In the absence of randomized data, a large body of observational evidence consistently indicates low rates of recurrence and high rates of survival, but points to a higher rate of complications compared to conventional breast conserving surgery. Established goals of oncoplastic breast conserving surgery are to broaden the indication for breast conservation towards larger tumors, and to improve esthetic outcomes. The benefit from the patient's perspective, however, remains largely to be confirmed. There is a growing demand to standardize various aspects of oncoplastic breast conserving surgery for implementation in clinical research and practice. Several classification systems and outcomes measurement tools have been proposed, but to the present day, none of them has achieved international acceptance.