Interventional therapy is a kind of minimally invasive therapy performed under the guide of medical imaging equipments. It is mainly divided into two broad categories: vascular interventional therapy and non vascular interventional therapy. The physician will introduce instruments such as needles or catheters (long, thin tubes) into the body through tiny(1-2 mm) incisions in the skin. The instruments are then guided by an imaging technique called fluoroscopy to the tumor. In this way, the physician can deliver cancer medicine directly to the tumor. No surgery, small trauma, quick recovery and good effect are the main characteristics of Interventional Therapy, which enables it to widely apply in diagnosing and treating tumors.
For the early-stage cancer patients, the survival rate of patients who have 5 years after radical resection is up to 60%-90%. However, due to the limitation of current technologies, over 70% of patients who are diagnosed with cancer are in middle or late stage. At this time, the cancer cells grow rapidly, and have metastasis to other parts of human body, which endangers the patients’ life. Minimally Invasive Interventional Therapy is able to cut off the nutrition supply of cancer cells and prevent the spread of cancer cells. As a patient is diagnosed with advanced-stage cancer, he/she already misses the best time for tumor resection. The minimally invasive interventional therapy can shrink the tumors to create favorable conditions for the surgery.
Traditional chemotherapy and radiation therapy also bring harm to the healthy cells while killing tumor cells, which will lower the immunity of human body and bring huge side effect. In the middle and advanced stage, cancer patients will be so week and have failure in their organs, thus they can not adapt to traditional chemo- and radio-therapy. The minimally invasive interventional therapy has little damage to human body and the medicine can be delivered to the tumor directly, which reduces the side effect.
Metastasis is a marked feature of cancer distinguished from other diseases, as well as the real cause of most cancer patients’ death. The minimally invasive interventional therapy can effectively reduce the metastasis of cancer cells.