Some doctors have begun using cryosurgery in an attempt to improve a patient's outcome compared to conventional surgical techniques.
Cryosurgery utilizes extremely low temperatures to destroy abnormal tissue containing cancers.
Cryosurgery has some potential advantages compared to conventional surgery in that it can be applied towards traditionally unresectable cancers, it does not require resection of large volumes of healthy liver tissue, and may prevent cancer cells from spreading during the surgical procedure. Doctors from Europe recently reported the results of a clinical study that directly compared conventional surgical techniques to cryosurgery techniques in patients with isolated cancer recurrences in the liver. Conventional surgery and cryosurgery were well tolerated in both groups of patients and there was no mortality attributable to either procedure. All patients in both groups were treated with systemic 5-fluorouracil chemotherapy following surgical removal of the cancer. In summary, cryosurgical treatment of isolated liver cancer recurrences is safe, and may be superior to standard surgical treatment of liver metastases.