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Summary
Interstitial laser-induced thermotherapy (LITT) is a recently developed, minimally invasive technique for local tumour destruction within solid organs. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the potential of MR-guided laser-induced thermotherapy (LITT) for the treatment of recurrent head and neck and liver tumours in a prospective study. In the head and neck study 12 patients with recurrent head and neck tumours were treated using MR-con-trolled laser-induced thermotherapy. In the liver study 76 patients with in total 171 histologically-proven liver metastases of colorectal carcinoma, oesopha-geal, gastric, pharyngeal, testicular and Pancoast tumours were treated with LITT. A total of 527 applications were performed. All procedures were tolerated under local anaesthesia with no clinically relevant side effects. MR thermome-try clearly demonstrated an area of signal loss with a radius of up to 15 mm in the vicinity of the laser tip. Dynamic gadolinium-enhanced MRI is suitable for early and late follow-up studies for lesions treated with LITT. Follow-up studies indicate that the laser-induced effects lead to reliable palliation in recurrent head and neck tumours. Our data prove a high tumour response in liver metastases smaller than 20mm in diameter. Technical innovations and increasing experience in combination with the multi-applicator technique improve the results in larger diameter lesions.