Image guided biopsy can detect residual breast cancer after chemotherapy: JAMA

Delhi: Image-guided vacuum-assisted biopsy (VAB) can predict the presence of residual cancer when performed after treatment of breast cancer patients with neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT), suggests a recent study in the journal JAMA Surgery.

Image-guided breast biopsy of a tumor bed or a residual imaging abnormality after neoadjuvant chemotherapy is being used increasingly for facilitating risk-adaptive surgery, assessing residual cancer, and potentially identifying exceptional responders in whom local therapy may be de-escalated. Marios Konstantinos Tasoulis, The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, London, United Kingdom, and colleagues further assessed the accuracy of post-NACT image-guided biopsy to predict residual cancer in the breast.

The diagnostic study analyzed multicenter patient-level data of breast cancer patients treated with NACT and underwent image-guided VAB before surgery at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, Seoul National University Hospital in Seoul, South Korea, and Royal Marsden Hospital in London, UK. Data from 66 women (median age; 49 years) were analyzed from June to July 2019. The median (range) tumor size on pretreatment and posttreatment imaging was 33.5 (12-100) mm and 10 (0-100) mm, respectively.