Pancreatic ablation: minimally invasive treatment options

Despite the significant improvement of knowledge and technologies in tumor treatments, pancreatic tumor remains a complex disease still characterized by a poor prognosis. The increasing role of minimally invasive techniques started to drive the effort of scientific medicine to evaluate the possibilities of application of these techniques to pancreatic cancer. The purpose of this paper is to present a brief summary of the different ablative techniques available and proposed for pancreatic tumor treatment considering invasive, noninvasive, thermal and non-thermal techniques.