What Is Interventional Oncology?

Cancer therapies, including surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, have many side effects. That’s less so with interventional oncology, a catheter-based approach that delivers treatment directly to the tumor. Interventional oncology is a rapidly growing, minimally invasive therapy for patients with liver, colorectal, lung, bone/soft tissue, kidney, and metastatic cancers. Rather than removing tumors through open surgical procedures, these image-guided procedures can be performed in place of or in combination with other cancer treatments to provide truly comprehensive care.

“The advantage of these methods is that they have much less effect on the rest of the body,” says Jeffrey Pollak, MD, Robert I. White, Jr. Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging. “There’s less collateral damage to the body as a whole and within the organ we’re treating.”  

In this video, Dr. Pollak explains how he uses interventional oncology techniques to deliver targeted therapies to patients with liver cancer.