Taipei Veterans General Hospital on Wednesday touted the successes of its Center of Advanced Image-Guided Intervention, which was established last year under the Radiology Department.
The center integrates medical imaging and minimally invasive medical treatments to provide patients with customized treatments.
A minimally invasive intervention for cancer treatment eliminates local tumor tissue and is guided by imaging tools, said Shen Shu-huei (沈書慧), director of the interventional radiology group under the Radiology Department, at a news conference.
Photo: Lin Hui-chin, Taipei Times
Compared with traditional open surgery, these treatments are less invasive, leave minimal incisions, take less time to recover and are less painful, Shen said.
One such treatment method included at the news event was cryoablation, which has been used in more than 600 cases since the hospital first introduced it in 2010.
A 73-year-old man, surnamed Kuo (郭), shared his experience of the treatment.
A 3cm tumor was discovered on Kuo’s right kidney when he was 61 years old and a doctor initially told him that it would be necessary to remove the fully-functional kidney because of the tumor’s location.
Instead, the hospital’s medical team used cryoablation to cure the tumor. Kuo was able to leave the hospital the day after the treatment, with his kidney intact and functioning, and there has been no sign of relapse over the past decade, Shen said.
Of about 300 cases diagnosed as kidney cancer, about 95 percent were under control following the first intervention and up to 99 percent were brought under control after repeated treatment, Shen said.
Sudies show that the new treatment’s medical effect is equivalent to surgery when treating tumors smaller than 4cm in length, Shen said, adding that unlike radioactive treatment, it has no dosage limits, so the process can be repeated in the event of a relapse.
The treatment is mainly used for kidney tumors, as well as tumors in the liver, lungs, musculoskeletal system and lymph node metastasis, Shen said.
However, cryoablation cannot be used for patients with coagulopathy (a bleeding disorder), when the cancer has invaded the intestines or in endovascular cancer cases, Shen said.
During the cryoablation procedure, a probe is guided to the tumor tissue using imaging, after which the argon/helium at the tip of the probe is rapidly compressed, which reduces the temperature to minus-160°C, forming ice crystals on the tumor and disrupting it, Shen said.
Taipei Veterans General Hospital’s Radiology Department chief Chiou Hong-jen (邱宏仁) said image guidance is essential for minimally invasive treatments and is not limited to X-rays.
The unit is to be renamed the Medical Imaging Department after official approval from the Veterans Affairs Council. Chiou said.
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