Lung ablation: Best practice/results/response assessment/role alongside other ablative therapies

Today, in addition to surgery, other local therapies are available for patients with small-size non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and oligometastatic disease from various cancers. Local therapies include stereotactic ablation radiotherapy (SABR) and thermal ablative therapies through percutaneously inserted applicators. Although radiofrequency ablation (RFA) has been explored in series with several hundreds of patients with pulmonary tumours, investigation of the potential of other ablation technologies including microwave ablation, cryoablation, and irreversible electroporation is ongoing. There are no randomised studies available to compare surgery, SABR, and thermal ablation. In small-size lung metastases, RFA seems to produce results very close to surgical series with >90% local control and 5-year overall survival of 50%. In primary lung cancer, the technique is reserved for non-surgical candidates. In future, the low invasiveness of thermal ablative therapies will allow for a combination of ablation and systemic therapies in order to improve the outcomes of ablation alone. Another major advantage of thermal ablation is the possibility to treat several metastases in close proximity to one another and retreatment in the same location in case of failure, which is not possible with SABR.