If a patient has skin cancer on face or visible area it’s about margins, dermatologist takes a thin shaving to check it. The idea is to get clean margins by removing the smallest amount of tissue as possible. That’s the same concept we’re working towards with lumpectomy.

We are working towards a new study where we hope to evaluate the accuracy of looking at the cavity versus residual disease.


DOTmed News: Is the system easy to use? What kind of training was involved?

SMF: It’s pretty intuitive and it’s very simple. It’s a sterile probe on the operating field and it’s quite fast which is important in the operating room. To use the probe for lumpectomy takes less than five minutes and there is not a lot of training required.

DOTmed News: Is there anything else you want to say about it?

SMF: We are particularly interested in patients who present with more advanced breast cancer. Historically, you could not do a lumpectomy if a patient had a large tumor relative to the size of their breast. One of the strategies we use now, if their preference is for breast conservation, would be to treat them with chemotherapy or anti-estrogen therapy prior to surgery with the goal to shrink the tumor.

Those patients are hard to get clear margins on because the tumors don’t shrink in a concentric way. Ideally it will shrink like a prune to a raisin; that’s easy. But sometimes it’s a piece of cheddar that becomes a Swiss cheese, with a bunch of hole where the cancer has been killed but the oval matrix is still quite large. It can be challenging is to know how much to remove.

We’re hopeful that the margin probe will perform well here. I have done two patients so far who had this treatment and they performed well. If this can help us with that subset then it will be a great benefit.

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