A30 Session 9: Women’s Health : Breast cancer cryoablation

Abstract

The surgical management of breast cancer has seen a radical evolution over the past several decades, characterized by equal or improved outcomes with significantly less morbidity. Eradication of the primary tumor has progressed from radical mastectomy (and extended radical mastectomy), through modified radical mastectomy, to lumpectomy. These changes have been facilitated by a multitude of factors, including improvements in technology and screening, better-quality and more widely used adjuvant therapies, and countless patients participating in multi-institutional prospective, randomized trials. The next, seemingly inevitable, step in the evolution of breast cancer therapy would be the replacement of lumpectomy, at least for a select group of patients, with non-surgical methods for destroying the tumor. Cryoablation has emerged as an alternative to surgery for tumors of the skin, prostate, kidney, liver and bone, and given recent advances in breast imaging, and our ability to target non-palpable lesions, it seems logical that breast cancer would be an ideal clinical target. However, adoption of cryoablation for breast cancer has proven challenging, with several obstacles still to overcome. This presentation will review the clinical experience to date with breast cancer cryoablation and some of the hurdles to its clinical implementation.