Using two successive pairs of specialized CT scans, a team of Dutch radiologists working with researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, has produced real-time images of liver tumors dying after direct injection of anticancer drugs into the tumors and their surrounding blood vessels. Within a minute, the images showed if the targeted chemotherapy choked off the tumors’ blood supply. Knowing quickly can save patients a month of worrying whether chemoembolization worked, or if repeated or more powerful treatments were needed. The diagnostic scans were performed on 27 men and women with inoperable liver cancer.
If further testing proves equally successful, the paired use of cone-beam CT scans, which are already approved for single-scan use by the FDA, could supplant the current practice of MRI scanning a month after chemoembolization to check its effects, which, if not successful, could allow a tumor to grow and spread.
The newer DPCBCT scans, in which X-rays are detected by a device the size of a large laptop that can be placed directly below or above the operating room table, have the added advantage of being performed in the same room, or interventional radiology suite, as patients getting chemoembolization.
The Johns Hopkins team’s reported about this novel use of dual-phase cone-bean computed tomography (DPCBCT), an imaging technique developed at Johns Hopkins, in this month’s issue of the journal, Radiology.
