Interstitial Radiotherapy with Iridium 192 in the Treatment of Early Breast Cancer

Reports on conservative surgery of small breast carcinoma have accumulated over recent years, and the results seem to be very promising [4, 9, 12–14]. The necessity of postoperative radiation therapy after conservative breast surgery was clearly demonstrated by the 5-year results of the NSABP trial B06 [7] and earlier by the Milan group [17] and by Hayward [8] and Atkins et al. [1]. B. Fisher et al. [7] have reported a local recurrence rate of 7.7% after segmental mastectomy and axillary dissection followed by irradiation of the breast vs 30% without radiotherapy. The aim of our study was to further reduce the local recurrence rate by adding interstitial radiotherapy with indium-192 implants at the site of the primary lesion to the percutaneous irradiation of the breast.