Interventional oncology for liver and lung metastases from colorectal cancer: The current state of the art

Interventional oncology is developing rapidly as a result of advances in imaging and medical devices. Although the treatments offered are recent and not yet fully validated in the guidelines, they allow non-invasive curative treatments to be offered to a growing number of patients. When it is used in a highly selected patients with less than three metastases under 2–3 cm in size, percutaneous tumor ablation offers local efficacy similar to excision surgery with considerable sparing of the parenchyma, both for lung and liver metastases. Hepatic intra-arterial therapies (chemotherapy, radioembolization, and chemoembolization) are now “salvage” methods after chemotherapy has failed and are being assessed in earlier lines of treatment.