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Updated: Aug 18, 2025

Application of Laparoscopic Hepatectomy Combined with Intraoperative Microwave Ablation in Colorectal Cancer Liver Metastasis
Published on: March 3, 2023
Learning curve of microwave ablation for liver cancers
Jianping Dou1, Jie Yu1, Wen Cheng2
1Department of Interventional Ultrasound, Fifth Medical Center of Chinese PLA General Hospital, Beijing 100853, China.
Purpose:
To evaluate MWA efficacy and safety by cumulative MWA volume and interventional experience.
Method:
3113 primary liver cancers treated by 7 operators between 2006 and 2018 were studied. Conditional logistic regression was used to estimate within-operators effects of increasing cumulative MWA volume per year on major complication, technical efficacy (TE) and local tumor progression (LTP) rates were adjusted for treatment-level characteristics. Changes were also evaluated by subgroups of tumor size and location.
Results:
Lower severe complication rate was detected only in higher MWA volume (HR: 0.31, P = 0.02)). TE rates increased with the increase of MWA volume ((100-150 procedures (HR: 0.33, P = 0.00); 150-200 procedures (HR: 0.08, P = 0.00)) per year. Similar results were found in subgroup analysis of interventional experience (5 to < 10 years (HR: 0.10, P = 0.00). MWA volume per year larger than 150 cases could reduce the major complication rate for tumors smaller than 5 cm (HR: 0.21, P = 0.03) and tumors in higher risk location (HR: 0.18, P = 0.03). The increase of MWA volume per year could significantly increase the TE rate in all tumor size, expect for tumors in high-risk location (100-150 procedures (HR:1.12, P = 0.84), 150-200 procedures (HR: 0.14, P = 0.08)).
Conclusions:
Early and intensive performance of MWA procedures would reduce major complication rates regardless of tumor size and tumor location, but could not improve TE rate in high-risk locations.

