Imaging Research and Cancer Diagnosis - Colorectal Cancer
06 August 2007 - Despite recent advances in imaging, preoperative therapies and surgery, colorectal cancer is the second most common cause of cancer death in the UK. Gina Brown, Consultant Radiologist in the Academic Department of Diagnostic Radiology at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, reveals what the Hospital is doing to challenge this statistic.
"It has been our goal to use detailed preoperative imaging with multidisciplinary discussion of these findings to identify patients at risk of local recurrence before surgery and alter the preoperative therapy as well as the surgical approach to prevent positive surgical resection margins," explains Dr Brown.
In the last 4 years the Royal Marsden has achieved this aim with the near elimination of tumour-positive surgical resection margins. This has translated into a substantial reduction in patients developing local recurrence, which in turn has resulted in improved long-term survival for patients. "Having demonstrated the success of this approach within our network, we wanted to show that this could be achieved by others," adds Dr Brown.
Colorectal cancer is unique: good survival can be achieved following successful resection of metastatic disease. Improvements in hepatic surgery and development of a hepatic surgical unit at the Royal Marsden have revolutionised the management of patients with colorectal cancer. "Our strategies are aimed at early detection of metastatic disease and aggressive combined chemotherapeutic and surgical removal of disease," says Dr Brown. This has been complemented with non-surgical approaches such as radiofrequency ablation as well as powerful palliative chemotherapy to prolong survival in patients with irresectable liver metastatic disease. "Our experience with imaging of liver disease has enabled us to demonstrate extremely high accuracy in both the early identification of liver metastases and confident characterisation of liver lesions," concludes Dr Brown.
Read more about Dr Brown's work in The Institute's Annual Research Report 2006. Her article, Imaging Colorectal Cancer, discusses the recent advances that have been made in colorectal imaging, therapies and surgery and the impact they will have on patients.
