7.5 Conclusions
Several percutaneous techniques have been developed to treat nonsurgical patients with liver malignancies. These minimally invasive procedures can achieve effective and reproducible tumor destruction with acceptable morbidity. Percutaneous ablation is accepted as the best therapeutic choice for patients with early-stage HCC when resection or transplantation are precluded. PEI is the seminal technique for local ablation of HCC, and may achieve a 5-year survival rate of 50% in selected Child A patients. RF ablation constitutes the most assessed alternative technique. On the basis of the identified evidence, RF ablation seems to reach higher cumulative survival and recurrence-free survival rates compared with PEI. RF ablation has also become a viable treatment method for patients with limited hepatic metastatic disease from colorectal cancer who are not eligible for surgical resection. Further trials are needed to establish the clinical efficacy of the other percutaneous treatments. An appropriate use of percutaneous ablation techniques can only be done when the therapeutic strategy is decided by a multidisciplinary team and is tailored to the individual patient and to the features of the disease.
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Lencioni, R., Della Pina, C., Crocetti, L., Cioni, D. (2006). Percutaneous Ablation of Hepatocellular Carcinoma. In: Stroszczynski, C. (eds) Minimally Invasive Tumor Therapies. Recent Results in Cancer Research, vol 167. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg . https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-28137-1_7
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