Minimally invasive approaches for diagnosis and treatment of early-stage breast cancer

Breast cancer management has been evolving toward minimally invasive approaches. Image-guided percutaneous biopsy techniques provide accurate histologic diagnosis without the need for surgical biopsy. Breast conservation therapy has become the treatment standard for early-stage breast cancer. Sentinel lymph node biopsy is a new procedure that can predict axillary lymph node status without the need of axillary lymph node dissection. The next challenge is to treat primary tumors without surgery. For this purpose, several new minimally invasive procedures, including radiofrequency ablation, interstitial laser ablation, focused ultrasound ablation, and cryotherapy, are currently under development and may offer effective tumor management and provide treatment options that are psychologically and cosmetically more acceptable to the patients than are traditional surgical therapies. In this review, we give an overview of minimally invasive approaches for the diagnostic and therapeutic management of early-stage breast cancer.