Chinese team pioneers scar-free, single-operation breast cancer removal

A Chinese surgical team has developed a robot-assisted technique for breast cancer removal that eliminates the need for follow-up surgery and leaves no visible scarring on the breast, offering patients a way to beat the disease without sacrificing body image.

The approach, pioneered by Liao Ning, head of breast surgery at Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital, combines ultrasound imaging, a glowing dye that highlights tumor edges, and a robotic surgical system into a single streamlined procedure.

Their findings were recently published online in the European Journal of Surgical Oncology.

With conventional breast-conserving surgery, 10 to 15 percent of patients require a second operation because some cancerous tissue is left behind. The new technique ensured that all tissue samples examined during surgery showed clean margins, with the final lab results confirming a 98.4 percent clean-margin rate and zero patients needing a follow-up operation.

The procedure requires tight teamwork. Once the glowing dye is injected into the tumor under ultrasound guidance, the surgical team has roughly five minutes to remove the highlighted area before the dye fades.

The robot's camera system turns the otherwise invisible tumor boundary into a visible green map on screen, and its mechanical arms carry out the cut with one-to-two-millimeter precision — a level of accuracy hard to match by hand.

Artificial intelligence plays a key role before surgery begins, building a 3D model of the tumor from scans and clinical data to map out safe cutting boundaries and predict how the breast will look afterward, helping surgeons plan removal and reshaping in advance.

Every operation was completed through a single small incision hidden in the armpit, leaving the breast surface scar-free, an emotional benefit for patients who previously faced a painful choice between survival and dignity.