Microwaves used to fight liver cancer

SALT LAKE CITY — Until recently, the discovery of a cancer tumor for Pam Vineyard Boucher has followed a pattern: Surgery to cut it out, followed by chemotherapy, then watchful waiting. The Farmington woman was first diagnosed with ovarian cancer more than a decade ago and has survived recurrences in 2006 and 2009.

But when a lesion was found on her liver in 2010 — presumably more of the same cancer now moved to a new location — she was quite literally sick of surgery and chemo. She wanted, she says, a new approach.

And that's just what doctors are calling a microwave ablation technology by a Utah company that kills soft-tissue cancers while sparing healthy tissue. The MicroThermX Microwave Ablation Systems seems to portend a change in how liver and lung cancer, among others, are treated, says Dr. James Carlisle, an interventional radiologist/oncologist at St. Mark's Hospital and the first doctor who trained in use of the device, created by BSD Medical. He has now used the new technology on a half-dozen tumors, including Vineyard Boucher's.

In September, just a day after she underwent unrelated knee surgery — "It was an accident of timing," she says with a laugh — Carlisle used catheters and CT scan imaging to place an array of little antennas into the lesion on her liver. It's a compact, synchronous microwave system with disposable antennas that communicate wth each other. "They overlap and add to each other to create bigger and faster ablations compared to previous types," Carlisle says.

The microwave generator and antennas can generate higher temperatures than radiowave ablation in order to destroy the tissue, while still being very well controlled in terms of location and ability to spare healthy tissue. It's minimally invasive, although the tumors it treats are sometimes large or even involve more than one mass.

The signals heated the tissue, killing the tumor. Then a little bandage was placed over the spot and that was it. "I didn't even feel any pain," says Vineyard Boucher.

Microwave ablation has been around a while, says Carlisle, but the new system is much more precise, so there are no "skin burns," which are possible with older technology.

The procedure, says Carlisle, can replace surgical resection of certain tumors. Plus there's no incision that will also have to heal. He predicts that it will particularly impact treatment for lung cancer, which he says is on the rise.

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