| Microwave ablation is an emerging curative therapy for solid tumors.Advantages include relative shorter operation time, higher temperature, minimalinvasiveness and wider indications of patients. For liver tumors, consequently,microwave ablation plays an important role. However, it also has limitations, the mostof which is the ablation size is not large enough for large tumors. Considering theparticular conditions of Chinese patients, whose liver function was limited and tumorwas always large, it is an important issue to improve ablation size. Researches ofradiofrequency ablation showed that injection of liquids such as saline, ethanol oracetic acid could improve ablation size. And the physical properties of water andethanol determine their particular role in microwave heating. We investigated thepossibility of liquids injection in the enhancement of microwave ablation. Thus, thisstudy consisted of three layers: firstly, features of pure liquids heating by microwave;secondly, the role of liquids injection in ex vivo liver microwave ablation; thirdly, therole of combined ablation in tumor bearing animals. The results of these experimentsmay shed lights on real clinical scenarios. In this study, we tested the heating featureof saline and ethanol of different concentrations. Despite the difference of heatingspeed caused by concentration, ethanol heated very fast, followed by saline, waterheated slower than the others. In ex vivo liver ablation experiments, we showedcombined ablation created larger ablative sizes. Also, we modified an implantationmethod for rabbit VX2liver tumor. The modified method induces tumors effectivelywith nearly no complication, as well as helps to create the tumor model for otherstudies. We tested the efficacy of combined therapy for tumor bearing rabbits. Though,we did not investigate survival effects, we did show that1ml ethanol injectioncombined with microwave ablation created larger ablative areas. And the safetyprofile was acceptable. |
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