Early assessment of the therapeutic response to radiofrequency ablation for hepatic local lesion with 3-dimensional contrast-enhanced ultrasound registration system: a preliminary study

Objective To investigate the feasibility of our new found 3-dimensional contrast-enhanced ultrasound (3D-CEUS) registration system as an early assessment of the therapeutic response to radio frequency ablation for liver cancer. Methods Twenty-seven patients with 28 lesions accepted 3D-CEUS before and after radio frequency ablation (RFA), the therapeutic respond to which would be assessed with 3D-CEUS registration system, recording the rate of successful registration. The CT was considered as the reference standard. Results Ten cases (35.7%) were successful matched with auto-registration and 24 cases (85.7%) were succesful matched with interactive-registration relatively. All cases were considered as complete ablated, which were confirmed by CECT with 100% accuracy. There were two cases achieving ablation margins ≥5 mm without local tumor progression (LTP) and nineteen cases achieving 0-4 mm ablation margin with 3 LTP 3-month, 6-month, and 1-year later. Conclusions The 3D-CEUS interactive-registration system can easily assess the therapeutic response of RFA in liver cancer immediately with high accuracy. Key words: Three-dimensional contrast-enhanced ultrasound; Registration; Liver neoplasms; Radio frequency ablation