Oral cancer represents an important health problem, as it is the sixth most common type of
cancer in the world and is associated with high rates of morbidity and mortality. The treatment considered the gold standard for this type of
tumor is surgical resection with negative margins, with a distance of at least 5 mm from the
tumor. This procedure is strongly associated with local control and disease-specific survival, however, in many cases, large amounts of healthy tissue are removed, resulting in surgical defects, compromising various functions and directly affecting the individual's quality of life. From this perspective, this systematic review aimed to evaluate the use of autofluorescence and
fluorescent probes as potential adjuvant techniques to facilitate the delineation of
surgical margins for
oral cancers. A comprehensive search was performed in Pubmed, Scopus, Web of Science, LIVIVO, Embase, ProQuest Open Access Dissertations & Theses, Open Access Theses and Dissertations, and DART Europe databases, where 1948 articles were found. After the different stages of critical evaluation, 15 articles were selected, eligible for the inclusion criteria. Of these, 7 articles used autofluorescence, 7 used
fluorescent probes and 1 article used both methods. As for autofluorescence, the most used device was the VELScope, and
indocyanine green was the most used probe. Compared to histopathology, autofluorescence did not obtain significant and/or superiors results. In contrast to
fluorescent probes that, most articles showed a good performance of margins during surgical resection, making them a promising alternative. However, it is still necessary to carry out the analysis of more articles, with more significant samples and sensitivity and specificity data to qualify the results.