Intraoperative radiation therapy after breast-conserving surgery. 20cc balloon application

Intraoperative radiotherapy (IORT) in breast-conserving surgery for cancer involves the administration of radiation to the surgical bed during the procedure. Until now, the available dimensions of the applicator balloons (30–40cc) required a distance >1 cm from the skin plane to avoid skin toxicity. The new 20cc balloon enables us to: expand the indications to areas of difficult skin coverage (eg, inner quadrants, upper quadrants, inframammary fold, etc); perform smaller lumpectomies as less surgical field is required for adaptation, which facilitates subsequent breast remodeling; and reduce treatment application times. As a result, more patients cannow benefit from IORT (Fig. 1)^1–3.

Figure 1