Comprehensive Management of Liver Cancer Patients

01 March 2016

The HYGEIA Hospital Hepatobiliary Surgery Department has just completed three years since its establishment. Since that time, it has been providing individualized treatment for all benign and malignant liver conditions.

The Department offers a comprehensive range of services that focus on prevention, diagnosis and treatment of any benign or malignant condition of the liver and pancreas, by implementing individualized and modern techniques for the management of both primary and secondary liver cancer.

The quality indices for the Department, as defined by the oncologic completeness of resections, the rate of postoperative complications, the length of hospitalization and finally the patient survival, are on par with some of the leading oncology centers in North America.

According to Dr. Georgios Tzimas, MD, PhD, FACS and Director of the Hepatobiliary Surgery Department, “Liver cancer is the third most common type of cancer in developed countries. Its treatment requires close collaboration among all liver related specialists, ensuring that each patient may receive the best individualized treatment and care. At HYGEIA, we have established a comprehensive team of healthcare professionals, consisting of a pancreatic & hepatobiliary surgeon, an interventional radiologist, medical oncologists, interventional gastroenterologists and qualified OR staff, offering thus multidisciplinary and multimodality treatment to these patients. Furthermore, our Intensive Care Unit has extensive experience in handling similar conditions. In cases where liver transplantation is not an option, the tumor is resected (hepatectomy), which offers long-term survival and even cure in a large percentage of patients.”To this day, more than 110 hepatobiliary surgical procedures (over than 60 major hepatectomies) have been performed at HYGEIA. The average hospitalization for these procedures is 3.5-5 days (one of the shortest in Europe).

As Dr. Tzimas further noted, “Apart from the conventional hepatectomy, other minimally invasive techniques for thermal tumor ablation are also used to treat liver metastases. These include radiofrequency ablation (RFA) and microwave ablation (MWA), which cause necrosis of the metastases, keeping the surrounding liver intact. They may be performed without surgery (percutaneously), laparoscopically, but also during surgery, in combination with the removal of other tumors. The Department also implements all the latest laparoscopic techniques, such as laparoscopic hepatectomy and simultaneous colectomy and hepatectomy, a technique that treats colon cancer and liver metastases at the same time. Some of the benefits of these methods include small incisions, minimizing the postoperative pain, allowing fast recovery with lower complication rates, especially in simultaneous colectomy and hepatectomy, which is not the case when the procedures are performed at different times. Furthermore we make sure to keep all the oncologic principles intact as in open surgery”.