Purpose: To confirm the safety and effectiveness of techniques to assist radiofrequency ablation (RFA) for difficult cases, we retrospectively evaluated successful treatment rates, early complications and local tumor progressions.
Patients And Methods: Between June 1999 and April 2009, a total of 341 patients with 535 nodules were treated as difficult cases. Artificial pleural effusion assisted ablation was performed on 64 patients with 82 nodules. Artificial ascites-assisted ablation was performed on 11 patients with 13 nodules. Cooling by endoscopic nasobiliary drainage (ENBD) tube-assisted ablation was performed on 6 patients with 8 nodules. When the tumors were not well visualized with conventional B-mode ultrasonography (US), contrast-enhanced US-assisted ablation with Levovist or Sonazoid or virtual CT sonography-assisted ablation was performed. Contrast-enhanced US-assisted ablation was performed on 139 patients with 224 nodules and virtual CT sonography-assisted ablation was performed on 121 patients with 209 nodules.
Results: In total, complete ablation was achieved in 514 of 535 (96%) nodules in difficult cases. For RFA with artificial pleural effusion, artificial ascites and ENBD, complete response was confirmed in all cases. For contrast-enhanced US- and CT sonography-assisted ablation, complete response was 95%. Early complications were recognized in 24 cases (4.5%). All cases recovered with no invasive treatment. Local tumor recurrence was investigated in 377 nodules of 245 patients, and 69 (18%) nodules were positive. Tumor recurrences in each assisted technique were 14.7% in artificial pleural effusion cases, 7% in artificial ascites, 12.5% in ENBD tube cases, 31% in virtual CT sonography, and 8.5% in contrast-enhanced US.
Conclusion: Although local tumor progression needs to be carefully monitored, assisted techniques of RFA for difficult cases are well tolerated and expand the indications of RFA.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
---|---|
http://dx.doi.org/10.1159/000315236 | DOI Listing |
Acad Radiol
January 2025
Department of Diagnostic and Therapeutic Ultrasonography, Tianjin Medical University Cancer Institute and Hospital, National Clinical Research Center for Cancer, Key Laboratory of Cancer Prevention and Therapy, Tianjin's Clinical Research Center for Cancer, Tianjin, China (A.U., L.C., L.Y., W.X.). Electronic address:
Aim: To evaluate the efficacy and safety of radiofrequency ablation (RFA) and microwave ablation (MWA) for treating cervical lymph node metastasis (CLNM) from papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC).
Methods: Medline, EMBASE, Web of Science, and Cochrane Library were searched for studies on the efficacy and safety of thermal ablations for treating CLNM from PTC until July 2024. Among 544 papers, 11 articles were reviewed involving 233 patients and 432 CLNM cases.
BMJ Open
January 2025
Institute of Health Economics and Clinical Epidemiology, Faculty of Medicine and University Hospital of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
Background: Magnetic resonance-guided transurethral ultrasound ablation (MR-TULSA) is a new focal therapy for treating localised prostate cancer that is associated with fewer adverse effects (AEs) compared with established treatments. To support large-scale clinical implementation, information about cost-effectiveness is required.
Objective: To evaluate the cost-utility of MR-TULSA compared with robot-assisted radical prostatectomy (RARP), external beam radiation therapy (EBRT) and active surveillance (AS) for patients with low- to favourable intermediate-risk localised prostate cancer.
Heart Rhythm
January 2025
Dante Pazzanese Institute of Cardiology, Department of Electrophysiology, São Paulo, Brazil.
Background: Brugada syndrome (BrS) is a genetic heart disease that predisposes individuals to ventricular arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death. Although implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) and quinidine are primary treatments, recurrent BrS-triggered ventricular arrhythmias can persist. In this setting, epicardial substrate ablation has emerged as a promising alternative for symptomatic patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Am Med Inform Assoc
January 2025
Division of Computational Health Sciences, Department of Surgery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, United States.
Objective: To develop an advanced multi-task large language model (LLM) framework for extracting diverse types of information about dietary supplements (DSs) from clinical records.
Methods: We focused on 4 core DS information extraction tasks: named entity recognition (2 949 clinical sentences), relation extraction (4 892 sentences), triple extraction (2 949 sentences), and usage classification (2 460 sentences). To address these tasks, we introduced the retrieval-augmented multi-task information extraction (RAMIE) framework, which incorporates: (1) instruction fine-tuning with task-specific prompts; (2) multi-task training of LLMs to enhance storage efficiency and reduce training costs; and (3) retrieval-augmented generation, which retrieves similar examples from the training set to improve task performance.
JACC Clin Electrophysiol
December 2024
St Bartholomew's Hospital, Barts Health NHS Trust, London, United Kingdom; William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom. Electronic address:
Background: The sympathetic autonomic nervous system plays a major role in arrhythmia development and maintenance. Historical preclinical studies describe preferential increases in cardiac sympathetic tone upon selective stimulation of the subclavian ansae (SA), a nerve cord encircling the subclavian artery.
Objectives: This study sought to define, for the first time, the functional anatomy and physiology of the SA in humans using a percutaneous approach.
Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!