A lumpectomy is a type of surgery for breast cancer to remove cancer or other abnormal tissue from your breast. Your doctor may call it breast-conserving surgery, partial mastectomy, or excisional biopsy. Unlike a traditional mastectomy, the surgeon removes only the tumor along with some of the breast tissue around it, and not the entire breast.

If you get a lumpectomy, you’ll most likely be able to return home later the same day. Some people choose to have a numbing local anesthesia, rather than to be put under with general anesthesia

Women who have this type of breast cancer surgery usually:

Have a single tumor that’s small — less than 5 centimeters in diameter
Have enough tissue so that removing surrounding tissue won’t leave a misshapen breast
Are medically able to get surgery and follow-up radiation treatment
A lumpectomy may not be right for you if you have:

Scleroderma, a condition that makes tissues harden — it’ll make it hard for you to heal after surgery.
Lupus, an inflammatory condition that will get worse if you need radiation
Already had radiation on your breast. More treatment is risky.
Cancer that’s spread throughout your breast tissue and the skin over it. A lumpectomy won’t be able to remove it all.
A large tumor and small breasts
Two or more tumors in different parts of your breast that the surgeon can’t remove with one cut. More than one cut could make your breast look odd after a lumpectomy.
No access to radiation treatments
 

• Some treatments remove or destroy the disease within the breast and nearby tissues, such as lymph nodes. These include:
• Surgery. For most people, the first step is to take out the tumor. An operation called lumpectomy removes only the part of your breast that has cancer. It’s sometimes called breast-conserving surgery. In a mastectomy, doctors remove the whole breast. There are different types of mastectomies and lumpectomies.
  Radiation therapy. This treatment uses high-energy waves to kill cancer cells. Most women under age 70 who have a lumpectomy get radiation, too. Doctors also might recommend this method if the disease has spread. It helps destroy any cancer cells that the surgeon couldn’t remove. Radiation can come from a machine outside your body, or you might have tiny seeds that give off radiation placed inside your breast where the tumor was.
  Other treatments destroy or control cancer cells all over your body:
•  
  Chemotherapy uses drugs to kill cancer cells. You take the medicines as pills or through an IV. Most people get it after surgery to kill any cancer cells left behind. Doctors also prescribe it before surgery to make tumors smaller. Chemo works well against cancer, but it also can harm healthy cells.
  Hormone therapy uses drugs to prevent hormones, especially estrogen, from fueling the growth of breast cancer cells. Medicines include tamoxifen (Nolvadex) for women before and after menopause and aromatase inhibitors including anastrozole (Arimidex), exemestane (Aromasin), and letrozole (Femara) for postmenopausal women. Some types of this therapy work by stopping the ovaries from making hormones, either through surgery or medication. Fulvestrant (Faslodex) is an injection that keeps estrogen from attaching to cancer cells.
  Targeted therapy such as fam-trastuzumab-deruxtecan-nxki (Enhertu), lapatinib (Tykerb), pertuzumab (Perjeta), and trastuzumab (Herceptin) trigger your body’s immune system to help destroy cancer cells. These medicines target breast cancer cells that have high levels of a protein called HER2. T-DM1, or ado-trastuzumab emtansine (Kadcyla). is a medicine that combines Herceptin and the chemotherapy medicine emtansine to target HER2-positive cancer cells. Abemaciclib (Verzenio), palbociclib (Ibrance), and ribociclib (Kisqali) are often used with an aromatase inhibitor or fulvestrant (Faslodex), in women with certain types of advanced cancer. Abemaciclib (Verzenio) can be used alone in women who have already been treated with hormone therapy and chemotherapy. Alpelisib (Piqray) is a PI3K inhibitor that treats breast cancer in men and women who have a certain gene change resulting from treatment with hormonal therapy. Neratinib (Nerlynx) also works against HER2-positive breast cancer by blocking the cancer cells from getting growth signals. A new class of drugs called PARP (poly ADP ribose polymerase) inhibitors targets an enzyme that feeds cancer cells. PARP inhibitors include olaparib (Lynparza) and talazoparib (Talzenna).
  Immunotherapy uses your own immune system to target cancer. The drugs atezolizumab (Tecentriq) and sacituzumab govitecan-hziy (Trodelvy) have been approved to treat triple-negative breast cancer that has spread.

You typically get radiation after a lumpectomy. This combination treatment helps women live about as long as those who have their whole breast removed, studies show. And you may get better cosmetic results since the surgeon removes less breast tissue.

But a lumpectomy plus radiation might not be a good option for women who:

 
Have multiple tumors in the breast
Have very large tumors or cancer that has spread to the lymph nodes or other tissue around the breast
Have had radiation to the same breast for an earlier breast cancer
Are pregnant
Have a tumor where it would be hard to remove enough surrounding tissue

Before your lumpectomy, the doctor should give you:

Specific instructions to follow in the days before the surgery
An overview of the procedure
Information about recovery and follow-up care
The operation usually takes an hour or two. Your surgeon’s team may use small metallic clips inside your breast to help guide them to the exact area to be removed.

They may check your lymph nodes during the surgery, too. During a procedure called sentinel node biopsy, they’ll inject a radioactive tracer or blue dye into the area around the tumor. The tracer or dye travels the same path that the cancer cells would take. That helps doctors spot any lymph nodes that need to be taken out for testing.

The removed breast tissue and any lymph nodes are sent to a lab, where tests help identify the type of tumor, whether the disease has spread to the lymph nodes, and whether the cancer is fueled by hormones. Other tests help your doctor find out how the disease may act and how best to treat it. It may take several days to identify the type of tumor and get the results of these tests.