Breast cancer is the most common disease in women worldwide

which not only threatened the women’s survival time

but also influenced their quality of life as well. Within this challenge

it’s important to optimize the current multidisciplinary treatment stratagem for breast cancer. Radiotherapy is one of the most important treatment modality for patients with breast cancer

with the trend to shrink the irradiated volume and shorten the total fraction times in recent years. Intraoperative radiation therapy (IORT) as a fast and convenient procedure has the ability to deliver a high

single-fraction radiation dose to tumor beds with minimal exposure of surrounding tissues (lung

heart

etc.)

which could be displaced or shielded right after the tumor removal during the surgical procedure. Right now

IORT has been either integrated as a boost technique in multimodal approaches using postoperative EBRT in the treatment of early breast cancer patients undergoing breast conservation surgery or used as a single dose accelerated partial breast irradiation technique for these patients. This review discussed the rationale of IORT

the benefits and limitations of IORT

the indication and the clinical results of this procedure

including treatment related side-effects as well in order to provide the preliminary evidence based approach for early breast cancer patients.