Breast Surgery

Breast surgery is a surgical specialty that in-volves procedures performed on the breast. There are two basic types of surgery to remove breast cancer; lumpectomy (also called breast-conserving surgery, partial mastectomy or wide excision) and mastectomy, where the entire breast is removed. A sentinel lymph node biopsy is a surgical pro-cedure used to determine if cancer has spread into the lymphatic system. The lymph nodes from under the arm are removed if the cancer is shown to have spread. Reconstructive surgery is also an optional pro-cedure to recreate a breast to replace the one that was removed and usually follows a mastec-tomy. A breast implant is inserted or tissue from another part of your body can be used to recre-ate a new breast. Choice is dependent on the cancer staging, the location of the tumor as well as the amount of surrounding tissue that needs to be removed.