Histotripsy for Liver Tumors: Treating Without Surgery

[INSPIRATIONAL MUSIC]
CASEY WARD: Histotripsy technology
has been a game changer.
Sutter Health was one of the first places in the country
to get one of these machines.
This is really for tumors or masses
that we otherwise had no options.
These are things that are inside the liver,
very high up, next to very critical structures
that, normally, I would have to either do
a transplant or a big liver resection.
Patients come for all different things,
patients who have benign lesions in their liver, like an adenoma.
Or this can come from people who have metastatic cancers.
Histotripsy is FDA approved for any lesion in the liver
whatsoever.
About 10 years ago, the University of Michigan
figured out that if you turn an ultrasound up really high,
you can actually make these little bubbles.
They actually figured out that it sheared tissue
and then it left all of the critical structures around it
intact.
And we can 3D map your tumor.
So I know exactly where the blood vessels are,
where the bile ducts are, where everything's at.
And that way, I can treat the tumor.
And I can make a perfect circle exactly
around the tumor with a little bit of a margin.
The whole procedure to actually do one ablation
takes about 20 minutes for each tumor.
So that can take anywhere from about 45 minutes to an hour,
depending on how many tumors they have.
This is on a whole different level.
This is taking it to a point where the patient really
has no incisions, no pain.
And so for us, the recovery period is remarkable.
So these patients go home about an hour or two
after the procedure.
Now we're getting long enough out
that we know that it's not only just
safe, it's absolutely effective and that it's long lasting.
So now we can start saying, OK, what other organs
could we benefit from?
We can treat the whole patient from start to finish.
And being at a place like CPMC and Sutter
is amazing because you have experts in every field
available.
There's things that interventional radiology
has been doing for 20 years.
And there's things for us, as surgeons,
we've been doing for a long time.
So the surgeons and the interventional radiologists
do it together.
So I can really say, hey, histotripsy might not
be the best for you, but it might be this person.
And that way, we can really plug people
in to that whole treatment care that Sutter offers.
We're starting to move what we always
thought was, it has to be this way, to really,
what could it be?
Sutter is all about that and is all in on innovation
and, What's the next thing?
How do we build that? with the patient at the very forefront.
[INSPIRATIONAL MUSIC]