Diagnosis
Diagnosis starts with a physical examination to look for swelling and hard lumps, which can be the first signs of liver cancer. Other diagnostic tools include:
Blood tests
These will be used to look for abnormalities that could suggest liver cancer. Abnormalities include high levels of calcium and cholesterol, low blood glucose numbers and the presence of hepatitis B and C.
Imaging tests
Ultrasound, computed tomography (CT) scans and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans will help your doctor take a closer look at what’s happening inside your abdomen and liver.
Biopsies
Your doctor may remove tissue from your liver to help make a definitive diagnosis. Often, this is accomplished by inserting a thin needle into the liver and extracting a small piece of tissue.
Treatment
At the Gastrointestinal Cancer Center at Orlando Health Cancer Institute, our fellowship-trained physicians will provide you with the best liver cancer care in Florida, offering the latest in treatment options for your diagnosis. Our multidisciplinary team approach unites the nationally recognized expertise of gastroenterologists, digestive health specialists, liver surgeons, radiation oncologists, radiologists, medical oncologists and , palliative medicine and nutrition specialists to provide you the best patient-centered care.
For patients with early-stage cancer who have otherwise healthy livers, surgery may be the best option. During a hepatectomy, your surgeon will take part, or all, of your liver with the goal of removing the tumor or tumors. The procedure is more viable when the tumors are small and do not affect nearby blood vessels. A liver transplant may be an option for patients whose entire liver needs to be removed during the procedure.
For some patients, surgery cannot safely remove the liver tumor. If the cancer has not spread to other parts of the body, treatment options usually focus on reducing symptoms and extending life expectancy, rather than curing the disease. These options include:
Chemotherapy
Intraarterial chemotherapy uses strong medicines to kill the dividing cancer cells.
Radiation therapy
Radiation therapy can be done externally using a machine to target the cancer cells with high-energy X-rays to kill them, or internally with a radioactive substance sealed in needles, seeds, wires or catheters to target the cancer.
Ablation
This uses a probe with tiny microwave electrodes that destroy tumors with heat.
Embolization
Is a procedure that injects substances to stop blood flow to cancer cells in the liver.
Targeted therapy
Specific molecular agents, antibodies or drugs designed to work in different ways from traditional chemotherapy while still covering the whole body.
Immunotherapy
Uses medicines that help a patient’s own immune system identify and destroy cancer cells.
Secondary liver cancer is far more common than primary liver cancer. That means the cancer is the result of metastasis of cancer from another part of the body to the liver. When that happens, our team uses highly specialized therapies to fight the disease. Among them:
Surgery
Staged liver surgery for tumors in both lobes of the liver during separate operations.
Yttrium-90
(Y90) glass spheres are a type of selective internal radiation therapy (SIRT) that is administered through a catheter in the artery that supplies blood to the tumor. These beads contain radiation and travel through the bloodstream to the liver, where they become lodged in the tumor and kill the cancer cells. This therapy delivers a dose of internal radiation up to 40 times higher than traditional external therapy and protects healthy tissues.
Chemoembolization
A procedure that delivers a highly concentrated dose of chemotherapy medicine through a catheter in the blood vessel at the location of the tumor. A blood vessel occluding agent also is used to starve the tumor’s blood supply. This two-pronged approach is often successful in stopping tumor growth or even shrinking a tumor.
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