Liver Cancer

Liver Cancer Treatment at Garnet Health 

The liver is the largest internal organ and one that you cannot live without, as it performs several very important functions that allow your body to function properly, including:

• Your liver is most well known for it's role in breaking down drugs, alcohol, and toxic wastes from your blood and excreting them from your body.
• Your liver also generates most of the clotting factors that keep you from bleeding too much when you are injured.
• Many important nutrients that your body needs for energy or to build or repair body tissues are broken down, or metabolized, and stored in the liver.
• Your liver is in charge of secreting bile into the intestines which help your body to absord nutrients.

The liver is made up many different types of cells that can form several types of malignant (cancerous) and benign (non-cancerous) tumors. These tumors have different causes, are treated differently, and have a different prognosis (outlook).

Cancer that forms in the tissues of the liver is defined as primary liver cancer. Whereas, secondary liver cancer is cancer that spreads to the liver from another part of the body.

Treatment Options

We are committed to providing patients and their families with the highest quality and most comprehensive care available. We employ cutting-edge technologies through every phase of treatment. For liver cancer, our most common treatments and procedures include:

• Chemoembolization - Chemoembolization places chemotherapy into a blood vessel that feeds a cancerous tumor, which then cuts off the tumor's blood supply and traps the chemotherapy within it. This type of cancer treatment is most often used for liver cancer, but may be used in other cases depending on a patient's individualized case. Chemoembolization can be performaned as a standalone treatment or, in some cases, it is used in combination with surgery, radiation therapy or radiofrequency ablation.
• Yttrium 90 (Y-90) - With this procedure microscopic beads of radioactive isotope are injected into hepatic artery to treat tumors in the liver. The procedure is performed in the Interventional Radiology suit with both an Interventional Radiologist and a Radiation Oncologist calculating and delivering the dose. This allows livers to receive a pinpoint dose, shrinking them and preserving healthy tissue.
• Selective Internal Radiation Therapy - Selective Internal Radiation Therapy (SIRT) is a form of radiation therapy most often used to treat liver cancers that cannot be removed through surgery. It is an image-guided treatment used to target malignant tumors in the liver directly via it’s blood supply using particles coated with radiation, called microspheres. These microspheres reduce the blood supply to the liver tumor, destroying tumour cells and preventing the tumour from getting the nutrients it needs to grow.
• Transarterial Chemo Embolization - Minimally invasive, image-guided treatment for liver cancer, Transarterial Chemo Embolization (TACE) is performed by a specially trained radiologist. This therapy involves the administration of chemotherapy directly to the liver tumor, which allows the tumor to be targeted without having to administer treatment to the whole body. Following the chemotherapy, the blood supply to the tumor is blocked (embolized), therefore the tumor is treated using two techniques. TACE can be performed multiple times to achieve the desired response in the tumor.