Potential Utility of Adjunct Imaging with Wide-Field Optical Coherence Tomography for Gross and Microscopic Evaluation of Breast Specimens in Real-Time in the Operating Suite

Abstract

One challenge in the surgical management of breast cancer is maximizing the preservation of healthy tissue while achieving acceptable negative margins. Tools capable of assessing disease-margin involvement intraoperatively and in real-time could provide clinically useful guidance regarding the adequacy of margin resection before the surgery is over. Here we report the intraoperative use of optical coherence tomography (OCT) in 3 patients with DCIS. In all 3 cases, additional lesions identified by OCT during surgery were also noted in histopathology reports 3 to 5 days post-surgery, suggesting that intraoperative use of OCT is a valuable tool for margin determination in real-time.