Single Fraction Elderly Breast Irradiation (SiFEBI) (SIFEBI)

Irradiation and Accelerated Partial Breast (IPAS) to this day remains a therapeutic concept whose validity is being assessed on its non-inferiority in terms of local control compared to whole breast irradiation. At least eight phase III trials attempting to answer this question and thus provide a sufficient level of evidence to make this concept a new standard of care for sub-groups of patients well defined (1).

However, without waiting for the final results of these randomized trials (which will not be fully valid with a drop of at least ten years), the American societies (ASTRO) and European (ESTRO) radiotherapy have all two proposed classification (very similar) into 3 groups according to the risk to the patient in terms of local recurrence after IPAS. And are defined by the ESTRO:

• The low-risk group ("suitable" for ASTRO)
• The intermediate-risk group ("cautionary" in ASTRO)
• The high-risk group ("not suitable" for ASTRO) (2.3). Therefore, it is possible to propose to a patient a randomized clinical tria IPAS, to subject it belongs to the group "low risk." The results of phase II trials as a long-term analysis of the matched team of William Beaumont Hospital (4) and the phase III trial using intra-operative radiation photons in low energy X whose results were recently published (5) confirm the value of this new therapeutic concept for post-operative breast cancer at low risk of local recurrence.

In France, the therapists were quickly directed to a sub-population for which the IPAS could represent a real improvement in the therapeutic management in significantly reducing the number of irradiation sessions of thirty in 6 weeks 5 days at 10 in a single view (6). Several French phase II trials were started specifically targeting the female population aged using a balloon catheter (MammoSite ®) (7) or by intra-operative radiation électronthérapie (8). The results of the test using the GERICO-03 brachytherapy with high dose rate (promoter: FNCLCC, National Federation of Anti Cancer Centres , recently merged into Group Health Cooperation entitled UNICANCER) are currently submitted to Journal Green Radiotherapy (Radiotherapy and Oncology from 09/11/11) (9).

On a technical level, two main approaches are used (10):

• Irradiation intraoperative electron or low-energy photons,
• Radiation after surgery The advantage of intraoperative irradiation is the optimal reduction of total processing time radio-surgery because the patient is irradiated during the lumpectomy. However, 15-20% of these patients receive partial breast irradiation, as histo-prognostic criteria provided in the histologically final report, confirm the non-adapted indication of IPAS (5).

In contrast, the post-operative IPAS can treat only patients meeting all criteria for IPAS but treatment-related travel are about 5 treatments for bi-fractionated (2 sessions per days separated by at least 6 hours).