iBeSuP · Towards the simulation of breast surgical lumpectomy and surgery planning through an isogeometric numerical analysis approach

Breast cancer is currently the most prevalent form of cancer affecting women all around the world. The treatment of early stage breast carcinoma involves either lumpectomy followed by radiotherapy or mastectomy. In the former case, only the tumour is removed but asymmetry and distortion of patient's breast may occur. To date, there are no tools that can accurately predict the cosmetic outcome of lumpectomy or breast augmentation surgery, which is to a large extent dependent upon the surgeon's experience and subjective judgement and, therefore, the result of such intervention procedures cannot be fully guaranteed. Thus, there is an acute need for a pre-surgical methodology that could provide both valuable information to the surgical team on pre-operative planning and guarantee a successful cosmetic outcome for the patient.The present proposal aims to develop an efficient and accurate numerical tool for realistically simulating oncoplastic breast surgery. The proposed numerical procedure will be based on the newly established Isogeometric Analysis methodology, in order to simulate the mechanical behavior of breast tissues that undergo large deformations during the incision, excision and wound healing process of standard lumpectomy surgery, as well as in breast augmentation with prosthetic implants. To this end, the proposed numerical procedure will be capable of incorporating patient-specific breast geometries obtained, in the initial development phase, through magnetic resonance imaging. As a result, it is expected that the proposed computational framework could assist surgeons in breast surgery pre-operative planning, while providing them with a valuable tool for the cosmetic outcome assessment.