Breast cancer represents the most frequent malignancy in women in the Czech Republic. Although surgery plays the basic role in the therapy of its early stages there hasn’t existed any specialized training in surgical oncology in our country so far. Majority of patients are surgically treated at departments of general surgery where sometimes outdated procedures are used as we know from our own experience. In the Masaryk Memorial Cancer Institute we perform approximately 500 breast surgeries a year and provide a team of surgeons specialised in this field. The aim of our article is to give a basic review of modern techniques in breast cancer surgery, to describe more precisely the most frequent ones and to give a list of some relevant literary sources

        Key words: breast cancer – surgical oncology – mastectomy – sentinel node biopsy – axillary dissection – breast reconstruction