Ablation of superficial bladder tumors with focused extracorporeal pyrotherapy.

Objectives: We report the first experimental studies of focused extracorporeal pyrotherapy.

Methods: Focused extracorporeal pyrotherapy has been used to treat superficial bladder tumors in a Phase II protocol in 25 patients. In 5 cases, for technical reasons, pyrotherapy was not used. In 20 patients (10 under general anesthesia and 10 under spinal anesthesia), the mean treated volume was 3 cm3 with an average of 300 shots and a mean skin focused length of 90 mm. Treatment time was 44 minutes; hospital stay was 2 days. Postoperatively, two skin burns and one acute retention were observed.

Results: Of 20 patients, 15 (75%) had a normal urinary cytology bladder ultrasonography and cystoscopy at 1 month. In 67% of patients with primary tumor, there was no recurrence at 1 year; 33% had recurrent tumors. No infiltrative tumor or metastases have been observed during this follow-up (3 to 21 months).

Conclusions: These encouraging results show that ablation of superficial bladder tumor is feasible. The technique must be improved to allow treatment of larger tumor volume in a shorter time.