IMAGE-GUIDED
CRYOABLATION
RENAL TUMOR
Image-Guided Ablation to Treat Kidney Cancer
Combining Galil Medical’s patented freezing technology and ultra-thin cryoablation needles with advanced imaging capabilities has created the opportunity for interventional radiologists to perform truly minimally invasive cryoablation for the treatment of kidney cancer. Currently, Galil Medical’s cryoablation system is used by interventional radiologists to perform percutaneous image-guided cryoablation on certain kidney tumors and on cancer that has metastasized to the liver. Interventional radiology treatments offer less risk, less pain and less recovery time compared to open surgery.
Interventional radiologists are considered minimally invasive treatment specialists. They have pioneered non-surgical treatments of many serious medical conditions, beginning over 40 years ago with the advent of angioplasty to treat blocked coronary arteries. Since that time, interventional radiologists have developed a wealth of minimally invasive procedures, both catheter based and percutaneous, that have expanded the population of patients eligible for treatment, and many conditions that once required surgery can be treated non-surgically by interventional radiologists.
One of the more recent treatment developments is the non-surgical ablation of solid tumors to destroy cancer without harming healthy surrounding tissue. Kidney cancer is the eighth most common cancer in men and the tenth in women. The most common type of kidney cancer is called renal cell carcinoma, or RCC, which makes up almost 90% of kidney tumors.
Although surgical removal of the kidney (radical nephrectomy) remains the best hope for cure for most patients with kidney cancer, many individuals are not candidates for surgery. For some of these patients, minimally invasive, image-guided treatments provide therapeutic alternatives to radical nephrectomy. These treatments also offer valuable benefits to those patients with advanced or metastatic renal cell carcinoma. Chemotherapy drugs and radiation have shown limited effectiveness in curing kidney cancer.
Image guidance refers to the use of imaging techniques (e.g., fluoroscopy, ultrasound, CT and MRI) during a procedure. A variety of image-guided percutaneous thermal ablation techniques are now available to interventional radiologists, but devices to apply only two of these techniques have been cleared by the FDA for use in treating tumors in the kidney. Therefore, cryoablation (also known as cryotherapy) and radiofrequency ablation (RFA) are the most commonly used thermal ablation treatments for kidney cancer. Other image-guided thermal ablation technologies include microwave ablation, and high frequency ultrasound (HIFU) ablation. The use of these technologies is considered experimental for kidney cancer.
In radiofrequency ablation, the interventional radiologist guides a small needle through the skin into the tumor. From the tip of the needle, radiofrequency energy is transmitted into the tumor, where it produces heat that kills the tumor cells. The dead tumor tissue shrinks and slowly turns into a scar.
Cryoablation is similar to RFA in that the energy is delivered directly into the tumor by a probe that is inserted through the skin. But rather than killing the tumor with heat, cryoablation uses an extremely cold gas to freeze it. This technique has been used for many years by urologists in the operating room, but a few years ago Galil Medical developed cryoablation needles that are small enough to be inserted by interventional radiologists directly through the skin without the need for a surgical incision. The "iceball" that is created around the needle grows in size and destroys the tumor cells by freezing them. The natural analgesic effect of cold therapy may be why patients undergoing cryoablation report less pain than those undergoing RFA.
If you would like more information on image-guided cryoablation for the treatment of kidney cancer, see the section Image-Guided Cryoablation of Renal Tumors. To learn more about image-guided cryoablation, see the section Image-Guided Cryoablation Overview. If you are interested in finding out more about kidney cancer and its treatment, please click on the Kidney Cryotherapy icon at the top of the page. |
