Ablation Techniques in Liver and Pancreatic Cancers

Giovanni Mauri, MD

Miltiadis E. Krokidis, MD, PhD, EBIR, FCIRSE, FRCR, FSIR

Hippocrates of Kos was born in 460 BC in the island of Kos, Greece and died in 370 BC in Larissa, Greece. He is often referred to as the “Father of Medicine” in recognition of his lasting contributions to the field as the founder of the Hippocratic School of Medicine. His intellectual school revolutionized medicine in ancient Greece, establishing it as a discipline distinct from other fields with which it had traditionally been associated thus establishing medicine as a profession. In his Aphorism written approximately 400 years BC states the following prophetic phrase, “The diseases which medicine cannot cure, excision can cure. Those which excision cannot cure are cured by cautery; but those which the cautery cannot cure, may be deemed incurable ….”

It is truly astonishing how Hippocrates could predict the effect of thermal energy in oncology. Ablation was introduced more than one hundred years ago in medicine however, it was considered as a tumor destruction tool from the midnighties. Having reached the age of 35 years, thermal ablation is now an integrated tool in the armamentarium of modern interventional oncology. But ablation has not evolved alone in the past 35 years. Imaging has evolved in parallel offering unprecedented guidance from minimally invasive interventions.

It is essential for interventional oncologists to be educated about the range of options that ablation may offer for liver and pancreatic tumors.

In this issue of Digestive Disease Interventions, experts of the field describe the latest evidence and technology in the ablation of liver and pancreatic tumors, offer an overview of the latest imaging modalities used for percutaneous ablation, and of the available combined treatments and define the role of thermal ablation and transcatheter oncologic therapies in immuno-oncology.