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Breast Cancer

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Decision Tools for Radiation Oncology

Part of the book series: Medical Radiology ((Med Radiol Radiat Oncol))

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Abstract

Numerous prognostic and predictive tools have been developed to help guide breast cancer counseling on outcomes, treatment decisions, and toxicity. Key prognostic and predictive factors remain estrogen and progesterone status as well as HER2 overexpression. Prognostic tools include Adjuvant! Online, which incorporates validated clinical prognostic factors to provide survival data, as well as Oncotype DX, which uses a 21 gene assay to derive a prognostic recurrence score and is also predictive for chemotherapy response, and Mammaprint, a 70 gene assay. Predictive tools including nomograms have been developed to help with many breast cancer clinical scenarios, including ductal carcinoma in situ, risk of sentinel node positivity, risk of non-sentinel node positivity in the setting of positive sentinel node, risk of brain metastases, and others. Tools to help predict toxicity have been developed, but are currently more sophisticated at predicting toxicity from systemic therapy than radiation therapy. These individualized decision making tools continue to advance breast cancer care and should be incorporated into patient discussions and decision making on validation.

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Fisher, C.M., Rabinovitch, R.A. (2013). Breast Cancer. In: Nieder, C., Gaspar, L. (eds) Decision Tools for Radiation Oncology. Medical Radiology(). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/174_2013_876

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