Ask the Specialist: Image Guided Cancer Therapy - Mahmood Razavi, MD

Chemoembolization is one form of targeted, or image guided cancer therapy. It's also referred to as regional therapy for cancer. It means we treat the cancer in certain areas, and focally in that area. The various cancers that have been treated have been shown to be affective, liver is one of them, bladder is another. There have been some reports in other parts of the body, like kidney, lung, and recently there have been some studies that are looking into this type of treatment for prostate cancer. However, some of these cancers have other methods of approaching them in a targeted fashion also. One of the other ways that we do treat these tumors is by direct interstitial therapy. What that means is that you put your needles from outside, under image guidance, into the tumor and you destroy the tumor either by heating it or by freezing it. There are various methods that one could use to destroy a local environment without affecting the rest of the body, or minimizing the complications in the rest of the body. And, the various sources of energy that are used to do that, in effect what we're doing is we're taking the tumor out from the tip of a needle. And, a small needle can be placed inside a tumor and destroy the entire tumor by delivering, as I mentioned, various kinds of energies to destroy the tumor.