What is an adequate margin after bone tumor resection?

Introduction

When a medical team is dealing with a primary malignant bone tumor, the standard goal of the treatment is to totally eradicate the disease with minimal treatment-related adverse effects. In that way, for more than three decades, complete surgical removal of the primary tumor has been an unavoidable step in the strategy treatment of the more frequent primary bone tumors: chondrosarcoma, osteosarcoma, Ewing's sarcoma, and together with chemo- and radiotherapy for the two later ones. This chapter reviews the notion of margin, which is the most common judgment criterion for the adequacy of bone tumor resection, its major significance for the multidisciplinary team around the patient and the disease, the limitations of medical language when it comes to characterizing margins, and the difficulty of asserting what is an adequate margin.