What is Interventional Radiology?

Richard Brittain, MD Speaks About Interventional Radiology Video Transcript

Interventional radiology is a subspecialty of radiology.  So an interventional radiologist are radiologists that have had additional training to perform a wide range of procedures in interventional radiologies.  These procedures are performed with imaging guidance and are minimally invasive procedures -- procedures that are usually performed through a small skin nik and are outpatient procedures.  The procedures are performed with imaging guidance, which usually means introducing a small tube or a needle or a probe into the patient in order to provide treatment or obtain a diagnosis.

There is a wide range of procedures that we perform both for diagnosis and treatment.  Procedures include arteriograms which are procedures where we are interrogating the arterial system with small tubes introduced into the blood vessels and injecting xray dye and taking xrays of the blood vessels.  At the same time if we find an arterial blockage, a blockage can be treated with a stent placement to improve flow through that blood vessel.  Other procedures are similar in that we can go with little tubes into the veins and inject xray dye and look for blood clots or place stents or place IVC filters or eventually remove an IVC filter.  The other procedures include blocking blood flow and blood vessels.  Treatment for uterine fibroids that are causing the patient a lot of symptoms can be done where we block blood flow to the uterine fibroids, thereby shrinking the uterine fibroids and reducing the symptoms. 

So those are procedures that involve blood vessels-- there are other procedures that we can do that involve imaging guidance where we place, for instance, a needle into a fracture of the spine, a compression fracture, and under xray we can place a needle into that compression fracture and inject a small amount of bone cement.  The bone cement stabilizes the fracture and treats the patient’s pain--that’s called vertebroplasty.

Other procedures include Venus access.  We do a lot of catheter placements for Venus access, such as central Venus ports for chemotherapy.  Or hemodialysis access where we are evaluating arterial Venus fistulas to improve blood flow and injecting xray dye and potentially doing baloon angioplasty to improve the flow. 

Another area where we’re seeing a lot of growth in interventional radiology, is cancer treatment.  There are various cancers that we have a role in treatment.  Cancers that are involving the liver can be treated with delivery of chemotherapy through the blood flow directly into the liver.  Or we can deliver radiation therapy directly into the liver in a procedure called Y-90.  Other procedures to treat cancers are called ablations.  Ablations are procedures where we use imaging guidance to place a probe into the tumor and the probe then delivers an energy such as radio frequency ablation that then kills the tumor.  So there’s a wide range of procedures that we perform, both for diagnosis and treatment, and they all use imaging guidance and are all minimally invasive and almost all are outpatient procedures.

Typically, patients find us through their physician, the treating physician that is seeing them may find that we have an IR procedure that is available that they feel would benefit their patient.  So, typically we are consulted as specialists from the patient’s treating physician.  Occasionally, we’re contacted directly by the patient, a patient that is searching things on the Internet and discovers that interventional radiology would be able to help them and they contact us directly. 

Why come to Miami Valley Hospital?  It’s the people – it’s the compassionate, caring, interventional radiology team that we have here, made up of highly trained nurses and technologists and physicians.  A team that always keeps the patient’s quality of care is highest priority.  The other reason is that we have an interventional center here -- a brand new facility.  The key with interventional radiology is that in many, many ways we provide procedures that are much safer than surgical alternatives.  They are outpatient procedures and require much less time in the hospital for the patient.  Recovery time for the patient is much less.  And so interventional radiology uses imaging guidance and technology to provide the same treatments in a much safer outpatient basis.