radiofrequency and microwave ablation in the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma

Background: radiofrequency ablation (rfa) and microwave ablation (mwa) are the most common thermal ablation methods. studies evaluating the effectiveness of these techniques have been carried out in recent years. objectives: evaluation of local therapeutic effectiveness of imaging guided percutaneous thermal ablation methods, short-middle term radiologic and clinical outcomes and to compare the effectiveness of treatment between twomwa and rfa methods. patients and methods: we retrospectively browsed clinical-radiologic-pathologic-demographic parameters of patients who had undergone rf or mw treatment due to hcc between january 2012 and january 2015. twelve females (30%) and 28 males (70%) who had at least 6 months follow-up were included. we evaluated the risk factors which we considered to affect the prognosis by means of log-rank (mantel-cox) analysis. complications rates, ablative effectiveness, local progression free and disease free survival rates for 6 months and 1 year periods were calculated by kaplan meier test for each group separately. the results of two groups were compared by chi-square test. results: 6-month, 1-year and 2-year survival rates for thermal ablation were 84.6%, 78.7% and 65% for general; 76.3%, 55.2%, 33% for disease free and 78.9%, 76.2%, 37.3% for local progression free respectively. size and number of lesions were the only parameters that effective for all type of survival rates. in addition, child-pugh classification, afp (alpha-fetoprotein) level and gender were found to affect just; general, disease free and local progression free survival rates respectively. no statistically significant difference was found in complication, ablative effectiveness, 6 month and 1 year general, disease free and progression free survival rates between rf andmwseparately. conclusion: rf and mw ablation methods have similar complication rates, tumor ablation efficiency and survival rates for treatment in hcc patients.