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William Hass, 70, was diagnosed with a type of kidney cancer that meant doctors in Florida would have to remove one of his kidneys, leaving him to face a long road to recovery and a lesser quality of life.
Instead, Hass traveled to Boston to receive care from Interventional Radiologist Server Tatli, MD, in BWH Radiology’s Tumor Ablation Program. The minimally invasive treatment uses extreme cold to freeze and destroy diseased tissue, including cancer cells.
“It’s been two years and so far so good,” Hass said during a telephone call last week. “I have not lost a step.”
More than a decade ago, patients like Hass didn’t have the option of alternative treatment, and people diagnosed with tumors that couldn’t be treated with surgery or other percutaneous techniques had few options. That has changed, thanks to the BWH Tumor Ablation Program, which recently marked its 10th anniversary.
“This is an important milestone because what we do changes the lives of so many people who otherwise could not be helped,” said Ferenc Jolesz, MD, vice-chairman for Research in the Department of Radiology and the director of the Division of Magnetic Resonance Imaging, who, along with other colleagues at BWH in the 1980s and early 1990s, provided concepts that the program has since translated to clinical practice.
Although the first MRI-guided ablation was performed in 1996 using lasers, a heat-based method of ablating cancers, the BWH Tumor Ablation Program pioneered the use of MRI-guided percutaneous cryoablation in 1998. For this minimally invasive treatment, physicians insert a small needle into a patient’s body and use image-guidance techniques such as ultrasound, CT or MRI to help guide freezing substances inside the body.
The patients who benefit most from this service have tumors of the kidney, liver, lung, bone or soft tissue that cannot be removed surgically either because of their location or because the patient is unable to undergo surgery.
“The effects of freezing are so well visualized with MRI that we are now able to treat tumors that otherwise simply could not be treated,” said Stuart G. Silverman, MD, director of BWH Abdominal Imaging and Intervention, CT scan and Cross-Sectional Interventional Radiology and HMS professor of Radiology. “Since the first patient, our program has performed more than 600 ablation procedures using cryoablation and other agents such as radiofrequency, all guided by MRI or CT.”
The Tumor Ablation Program staff lead translational research and have published more than 50 original articles, 30 reviews and chapters and one textbook on the subject. The Tumor Ablation Program also has contributed to the department’s successful effort to secure funding from the National Institutes of Health and other sources.