We were delighted in early June to see Dr Govindarajan Narayanan, known to our community simply as Dr Raj, and his fellow authors, publish a paper on the treatment of EHE liver tumours using IRE ablation. The abstract from the paper read:
“Hepatic epithelioid hemangioendothelioma (HEHE) is a rare tumor with currently no established standard of care. This international multicenter retrospective study assesses the use of percutaneous irreversible electroporation (IRE) as an ablative tool to treat HEHE and provides a clinical overview of the current management and role of IRE in HEHE treatment. The current study provides evidence that IRE is a safe and efficacious minimally invasive treatment option for HEHE.”
Dr Narayanan, the first named author on the paper, commented:
“I am excited that our multi-year project involving ablation using IRE in the treatment of HEHE is published in the CardioVascular and Interventional Radiology (CVIR) journal. This project involved transplant surgery, oncology and interventional oncology collaborating on a manuscript.
A huge thanks to our patients. Your courage inspires us. Thanks also to our entire team at Miami Cardiac and Vascular Institute (MCVI), and the EHE Foundation.”
The publishing of this paper is an important event, as Hugh Leonard explained:
“The drafting of such a paper was first raised by the EHE Group at the very start of 2019, in the hopes of providing evidence to regulators and clinicians across the globe that IRE ablation should be approved for HEHE. At that point however results were not collated and EHE patient numbers treated with IRE ablation were low. So we are delighted to see this important paper published. We also hope that it will encourage other interventional radiologists to use IRE to treat EHE, and may become an important part of the evidence required to get health regulators to approve its use.”
In addition to Dr Narayanan, the paper was co-authored by Madelon Dijkstra, Anthony Spano, Nicole Gentile, Michelle M. Shnayder-Adams, Varshana Gurusamy, David M. Levi, Breelyn Wilky, MD, Ronald A. Mora, Raihan Noman, Dr Praveen Peddu.
We thank them all for their time and dedication given to producing this paper, but more importantly to the EHE patient community who agreed to the use of their cases in the writing of the manuscript.
For those who wish to read the paper, it can be found at: