The significance of imaging techniques for radiotherapy planning of the invasive breast carcinoma

During the last few years, desisions about the therapy for breast carcinoma increasingly tend to favour breast-conserving surgery accompanied by adjuvant radiotherapy. The article presents the details of the case of a female patient treated with breast-conserving surgery and subsequent adjuvant radiotherapy. Radiotherapy planning was based on the data of computerized exposure field computation derived by modern tomographic methods such as CT and MRI. It is shown that this treatment achieves five-year survival rates of 80 to 90%, and that the cosmetic outcome is well accepted by the patients. This is not least due to the individual radiotherapy planning which keeps side-effects at a very low level. (orig.)