Surgery is the actual physical removal and/or treatment of cancerous tissue by making incisions in the body. Surgery is the oldest and often the most effective form of cancer treatment for solid tumors, but it is also the most invasive with a high level of risk. Surgery is sometimes used in conjunction with chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy in the more complex gastrointestinal cancer cases.

UAB offers robotic surgery using the da Vinci system. Robotic surgery is minimally invasive technologically enhancing the surgeon's skills and making it easier to perform more complicated surgeries through a smaller incision.

Although robotic arms perform the actual surgery, they still require direct input from the surgeon and cannot be merely programmed to operate without the surgeon's intervention.

Advantages of robotic assisted surgery include:

• smaller incisions
• less blood loss and need for transfusion
• decreased pain, discomfort, and recovery time
• shorter hospital stay
• less scarring

Unfortunately, many patients are not surgical candidates for a variety of reasons, including the extent of their disease, their inability to withstand the procedure due to poor health, or additional malignant activity elsewhere in the body that renders aggressive surgical therapy inappropriate.

In these situations, a surgeon may elect for radiofrequency ablation. A safe and effective localized treatment, radiofrequency ablation is used to rapidly heat and destroy liver cancer as well as liver metastasis, leaving the surrounding healthy tissue unharmed.

Other nonsurgical approaches include chemoembolization, in which a tube is inserted into the blood vessel feeding the tumor and small foreign bodies coated in chemotherapy drugs are infused, and radiosurgery, which precisely focuses an array of radiation beams on cancer tissue from many different direction and avoids damage to surrounding healthy tissue.

You can find more information about surgery and other treatment options at the American Cancer Society.