Research advancement in local ablation therapy for liver cancer.

After developing for more than 20 years, image-guided local ablation therapy has become one of the major treatments of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). In particular, percutaneous radio-frequency ablation has been widely accepted as the first-line treatment of early-stage HCC. A number of randomized controlled trials have shown some differences between these local ablation techniques. This article reviewed the development of local ablation therapy in the past few years.