Significance of surgical margins assessment in head-and-neck squamous cell carcinoma: A surgeon's perspective

Head-and-neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is the most common malignant tumor of the oral cavity. HNSCC can be treated by surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy and sometimes combinations of all these modalities, and among all these modalities, surgery is the most accepted line of treatment. The purpose of cancer surgery is achieving complete resection of the tumor, and its success depends on not leaving any residual neoplastic cell. Despite all the recent advances in the diagnosis and treatment of these patients, HNSCC is showing increasingly high recurrence rates. The surgical margins (SMs) or resection margins are the margins or boundaries of resection specimen, which is excised by the surgeon. The goal of this review was to evaluate the significance of SMs in adequate and proper treatment of HNSCC along with minimum recurrence.