Interventional oncology for liver and lung metastases from colorectal cancer: The current state of the art.

Interventional oncology is developing rapidly as a result of advances in imaging and medical devices. Although the treatments offered are recent and not yet fully validated in the guidelines, they allow non-invasive curative treatments to be offered to a growing number of patients. When it is used in a highly selected patients with less than three metastases under 2-3cm in size, percutaneous tumor ablation offers local efficacy similar to excision surgery with considerable sparing of the parenchyma, both for lung and liver metastases. Hepatic intra-arterial therapies (chemotherapy, radioembolization, and chemoembolization) are now "salvage" methods after chemotherapy has failed and are being assessed in earlier lines of treatment.