Around 42,220 adults in the US are diagnosed with liver cancer every year. Removing the liver tumors with surgery is the best treatment option, but this is often not possible due to the large size or location of the tumor. Sometimes, many small tumors can spread throughout the liver, making surgery ineffective. For these patients, our Interventional Radiologists are able to use minimally invasive procedures to treat liver tumors.

Treatments

Radioembolization

Radioembolization is a minimally invasive procedure which involves X-Ray imaging to guide a catheter to the blood vessel which feeds the liver tumor. Using the catheter, millions of microspheres are placed in the vessel, cutting off the blood supply to the tumor while emitting radiation that kills the tumor cells.

This treatment is palliative, not curative, and is meant to relieve pain and improve quality of life. This is an outpatient procedure and requires no hospital stay, and also has fewer side effects compared to standard cancer treatments.

Recent studies have found that patients treated with radioembolization and chemotherapy lived 20 months longer than patients treated with chemotherapy alone.

Chemoembolization

Chemoembolization is also a minimally invasive procedure similar to radioembolization but this procedure involves delivering chemotherapy drugs directly into the liver through a catheter, rather than microspheres. The Interventional Radiologist also shuts off the artery supplying blood to the tumor.