Health Spotlight | Liquifying liver tumors

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — More than 40,000 people will be told they have liver cancer this year. Thirty thousand will die from the disease. It’s considered the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. Traditional treatments include surgery, chemo and radiation. Now, doctors have a new tool in their toolbox to fight it — a cutting edge alternative so strong, it liquifies the tumor.

“The liver’s an organ that can actually form many different types of cancers,” said Dr. Eric Liu, MD, a neuroendocrine surgeon at Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center.

Liver, lung, colon, prostate, melanoma, breast – cancers from all over the body can end up in the liver — and now, Liu is one of the first to use ultrasound to destroy them.

“It’s a technique in which we can fire very, very high-powered ultrasound beams into the liver and we can actually dissolve the tumors directly without having to cut them open,” Liu said.

Histotripsy uses 52 beams of ultrasound and can focus on a target as small as a BB.

“Do you remember when we were kids? And you could take a magnifying glass and you could burn a leaf right on that one spot,” Liu said. “We can do the same thing now for tumors in the liver.”

The tumor is liquified and destroyed on the spot. Then, the body will rid itself of the liquid left behind. And unlike radiation, histotripsy does not impact the surrounding tissue and organs.

“The radiation can really damage a lot of the neighbors. The innocent bystanders nearby. Histotripsy is not like that,” Liu said.

Giving doctors and patients another way to battle cancer and win.

Because histotripsy is non-invasive, it can be done as many times as needed. Right now, histotripsy is only approved for liver tumors, but as technology advances, Liu hopes they will be able to use it on many more, if not all, types of tumors.

This story was created from a script aired on WISH-TV. Health Spotlight is presented by Community Health Network.