Groundbreaking liver surgery in south

Patients with cancerous liver tumours who are unwilling (or unable) to have surgery now have the option of a groundbreaking method to destroy the tumours minus the complications of surgery. The procedure, microwave oblation of liver metastasis, was done for the first time in TT on two female patients by hepato-pancreatico-biliary surgeon Prof Shamir Cawich at the Southern Medical Centre, Quenca Street, San Fernando.

Liver metastasis is cancer that started in another part of the body and spread to the liver. Ablation is a treatment that destroys liver tumours without removing them, while microwave ablation uses the energy from electromagnetic waves to heat and destroy the tumour using a probe. Speaking to reporters before the procedure, Cawich said this was the first time it was being done in the English-speaking Caribbean.

He said the five-year survival rate for colon cancer patients whose cancer has spread to the liver is about one per cent. “With the best chemotherapy you have available, chances is between five and eight per cent, maybe up to ten per cent chance you will live to five years, and with microwave oblation, you can increase that to anywhere between 30-40 per cent. “Obviously the best is still surgery: surgery will give you up to 45 per cent for five-year survival and a chance of survival of up to ten years, which is about 20 per cent, but again, it comes at the risk of significant complications.”

With this new microwave technology, he explained, "We are delivering electromagnetic waves directly down to the tumours and killing them in the liver without the need for surgery and the need to remove them.”  He said an Emprint generator is used to create the microwave field, which is then delivered by a small probe. The heat generated can reach up to 200 degrees Celsius.

“We are going to direct the microwave field directly into the middle of the tumour, and the tumour will be killed directly inside the liver, and what the body will do is reabsorb these dead cells and replace it with a scar.”