Active clinical trials for "Liver Neoplasms"

The purpose of this multicenter study is to evaluate the agreement among expert radiologists in interpreting magnetic resonance images (MRI) assessing common primary liver tumours in non-cirrhotic patients.

One of the most recent and interesting field of diagnostic imaging is diffusion-weighted MR imaging (DW-MRI). Various studies evaluated the application of DW-MRI to diffuse liver disease and focal liver lesions providing controversial results, probably due to the difficult reproducibility of the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) measurements. It is conceivable that a wide inter/intra-individual variability actually exists in the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC)-values, and that each apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC)-value presents an higher reliability in measuring the temporal changes of water diffusion within the same individual (longitudinal-evaluation), than in characterizing tissues between different patients (transverse-evaluation). For these reasons, some previous studies assessed the application of DW-MRI in predicting the chemotherapy (CHT) outcome in liver metastases. The rationale of these studies was the overt biochemical changes shown by the neoplastic cells after CHT and the sensitivity of DW-MRI in the identification of such changes. The same authors noticed that the metastatic lesions with the lowest ADC-values present also the best outcome after CHT. Moreover, these studies suggest that it could be possible to assess if each single patient will respond (R) or not (NR) to the CHT through liver DW-MRI performed from 3 days to 3 weeks after the beginning of CHT.

Patients with malignant diseases are increasingly receiving more extensive hepatic resections, with im-proved preoperative and postoperative care leading to a reduced postoperative morbidity and mortality. In this setting, postoperative quality of life may become as important as overall patient survival. In this study we will be investigating the effect of the initial disease for which hepatic resection was carried out on short- and long-term quality of life.

RATIONALE: Studying a patient's understanding of his or her illness, pain, symptoms, and quality-of-life may help the study of advanced cancer and may help patients live more comfortably. PURPOSE: This clinical trial is studying pain and symptom distress in patients with advanced colon cancer, rectal cancer, pancreatic cancer, or liver cancer.

An increasing aggressiveness in the surgical approach of colorectal liver metastases is observed. This seems only justified when, besides prolongation of survival, also the health status of patients is considered. The aim of this prospective study is to investigate the impact of surgery on health-related quality of life in this specific patient population operated for colorectal liver metastases.Furthermore, as the indications for hepatic resection are broadened and patients with more extensive liver disease are operated on, the chance of non operable disease at laparotomy will increase. The effects of such an event on HRQol are also studied.

Liver is special organ, which can regenerate. On that ability there are many treatment modalities, where liver resection is performed, especially in cancer patients with liver metastases. Liver regeneration provides an opportunity for these patients to undergo multiple treatment regimes and liver resections to achieve curability. There are many factors that impair liver regeneration. One of these factors is chemotherapy. Literature data on impact of chemotherapy to liver regeneration is ambiguous. Therefore we aim to research impact of chemotherapy to liver regeneration.

A before and after trial comparing the systematic use of blood salvage therapy with leucocyte filter during oncologic liver resections. Recurrence, survival, allogenic transfusion rates and surgical outcomes are compared with a representative historic cohort.

The recently introduced chemoembolization has been considered to be a very attractive new method in terms of response in the treatment of liver metastases from colon cancer carcinoma (LM-CRC). It appears to be particularly useful if carried out with the new embolization materials. An 80% response rate was reported using TACE with Irinotecan pre-loaded Beads in patients with liver metastases from colon cancer, who had been pretreated with 2 or more lines of chemotherapy. Since a greater activity was attained by a combination of Cetuximab and Irinotecan versus Cetuximab in monotherapy, the European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products (EMEA) has granted authorization to the use of Cetuximab in association with irinotecan in the treatment of irinotecan-refractory CRC-LM. In this study we want to collect data on on time to progression and tolerability using DEBIRI+Cetuximab in LM-CRC

Liver surgery should be considered an echo-guided procedure to guarantee conservative but radical resections. The investigators describe a further application of intraoperative ultrasonography (IOUS) for studying the biliary tree during liver surgery with no need for formal cholangiography.

This is a feasibility study to perform image-guided liver biopsies in 25 patients who have pancreatic cancer with liver metastasis (cancer in the pancreas that has spread to the liver). This will contribute with samples for the bio-bank (bank of tumors) and develop xenografts (human tumors growing in mice) for further analysis of genes.