Intraoperative breast specimen assessment in breast conserving surgery: comparison between standard mammography imaging and a remote radiological system.

Abstract

The aim of this paper was to compare standard specimen mammography (SSM) with remote intraoperative specimen mammography (ISM) assessment in breast conserving-surgery (BCS) based on operative times, intraoperative additional excision (IAE) and re-intervention rates.

We retrospectively compared 129 consecutive patients (136 lesions) who had BCS with SSM at our centre between 11/2011 and 02/2013 with 138 consecutive patients (144 lesions) who underwent BCS with ISM between 08/2014 and 02/2015.

SSM or ISM were performed to confirm the target lesions within the excised specimen and margin adequacy. The utility of SMM and ISM was evaluated considering pathology as gold-standard, using χ2 or Fisher’s exact tests for comparison of categorical variables, and non-parametric Mann–Whitney test for continuous variables.