Diagnosing Liver Cancer
How is liver cancer diagnosed? In this video, Dr. Leon Yoder of Cancer Treatment Centers of America explains how doctors are able to diagnose this type of cancer.
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Dr. Leon Yoder: We diagnose liver cancers by different techniques. Sometimes it's very difficult to diagnose early liver cancers. Oftentimes, the diagnosis rests on a biopsy of the liver. And usually the interventional radiologist will insert a needle into the liver with anesthesia and take biopsies. And that, oftentimes, will tell us there is a cancer there in the liver. It's very important to know the cell type as well because there are different types of liver cancer that respond differently to different types of treatments.
The other way to diagnose liver cancer is that there are tumor markers that, oftentimes, will tell us this has to be a certain type of cancer. So if we look at tumor markers, if we scan your liver by CT scan or MRI, then we can tell that is a cancer there, and the biopsy was not necessary in that particular case.