X-ray coherent scatter imaging for surgical margin detection: A Monte Carlo study

Instead of having the entire breast removed (a mastectomy), breast cancer patients often receive a breast con-serving surgery (BCS) for removal of only the breast tumor. If post-surgery analysis reveals ta missed margin around the tumor tissue excised through the BCS procedure, the physician must often call the patient back for another surgery, which is both difficult and risky for the patient. If this “margin detectionâ€could be performed during the BCS procedure itself, the surgical team could use the analysis to ensure that all tumor tissue was removed in a single surgery, thereby potentially reducing the number of call backs from breast cancer surgery. We describe here a potential technique to detect surgical tumor margins in breast cancer using x-ray coherent scatter imaging. In this study, we demonstrate the imaging ability of this technique using Monte Carlo simulations.