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A plea for the biopsy marker: how, why and why not clipping after breast biopsy?

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Abstract

In the last decade, percutaneous breast biopsies have become a standard for the management of breast diseases. Biopsy clips allow for precise lesion localization, thus minimizing the volume of breast to be resected at the time of surgery. With the development of many imaging techniques (including mammography, sonography, and breast magnetic resonance imaging), one of the challenges of the multidisciplinary became to synthesize all informations obtained from the various imaging procedures. The use of biopsy markers after percutaneous biopsy is one of the keys for optimal patient management, helping the radiologist to deal with multiple lesions, to insure correlation across different imaging modalities and to follow-up benign lesions, helping the oncologist by marking a tumor prior to neoadjuvant chemotherapy, helping the surgeon by facilitating preoperative needle localization, to precisely mark the margins of extensive disease and to guide intraoperative tumor resection, and helping the pathologist to insure the lesion of interest has been removed and to identify the region of interest in a mastectomy specimen. We believe biopsy clip markers should be deployed after all percutaneous interventions and present in this review the arguments to support this statement. Minimal indications for clip deployment will also be detailed.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Radiology, Service de Radiologie, Hôpital Tenon, Hôpitaux Universitaires Paris Est, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Cancer Est, 4 rue de la Chine, 75020, Paris, France

    Isabelle Thomassin-Naggara

  2. Department of Radiology, Centre d’imagerie du Sein, Hôtel Dieu, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Montréal (CHUM), Montreal, QC, Canada

    Lucie Lalonde, Julie David & Isabelle Trop

  3. Department of Gynaecology and Obstetrics, Hôpital Tenon, Hôpitaux Universitaires Paris Est, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Cancer Est, Paris, France

    Emile Darai & Serge Uzan

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  1. Isabelle Thomassin-Naggara
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  2. Lucie Lalonde
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  3. Julie David
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  4. Emile Darai
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  5. Serge Uzan
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  6. Isabelle Trop
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Correspondence to Isabelle Thomassin-Naggara.

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Thomassin-Naggara, I., Lalonde, L., David, J. et al. A plea for the biopsy marker: how, why and why not clipping after breast biopsy?. Breast Cancer Res Treat 132, 881–893 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10549-011-1847-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10549-011-1847-x

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