RFA Pays Off

Medical workers at Clinical Department No. 2 of the Specialized Digestive Organs Hospital under the Korea General Red Cross Hospital have introduced advanced treatment methods to improve the quality of medical service.

Medical workers including Jo Tong Hui, head of the department, Hong Rye Yong and others are treating early-stage liver cancer with RFA (radiofrequency ablation), a kind of interventional therapy.

RFA is a local treatment therapy for ablating cancer tissue by using radiofrequency. In other words, the therapy generates heat in the tumour with an accumulation of electronic energy by infiltrating radiofrequency into the tumour, and coagulates the tumour tissue.

This approach allows the treatment of early-stage liver cancer without resorting to surgical operations, thus shortening the treatment period and increasing reduction rate of tumour as well as decreasing its recurrence rate.

The medical workers of the hospital have long made a research to apply RFA to the treatment for the primary early-stage liver cancer.

They selected relevant technical indices and their characteristic values through an in-depth study of preceding documents and repeated experiments. Although they repeatedly failed, they did not give up but manufactured a device requiring precision and sensitivity by their own efforts.

As a result, they established the “Treatment Method for the Primary Early-stage Liver Cancer with RFA.”

The method received a certificate of introduction of sci-tech hits and was highly appreciated at the exhibition of sci-tech achievements in different sectors of the national economy-2025.