At our clinic we also provide oncovascular surgery cover.
What does this means? Not uncommonly, many complex primary and recurrent tumours also involve major vessels. This can be a major vein like IVC (inferior vena cava) or an artery like aorta or iliac vessels. We provide assistance to oncology surgeons to resect tumours without damaging major vessels. On some occasions we actually resect the vessels and reconstruct another vessel or by pass in order to maintain the local organs or distal organs normal blood supply.
The below diagram shows that we identify the distal branches of the internal iliac vessels which are involved in a pelvic exenteration surgery. This will allow safe resection of tumours as well as preventing major bleeding once all the branches are protected and possible repaired. This is common practice as previous radiotherapy will make the whole surgery very complex.
Another example of oncovascular surgery below that shows we resected a 10 cm carotid body tumour ( low malignancy, slow growing tumour)with carotid artery reconstruction. The tumour was deemed inoperable without major reconstruction work.
The diagrams below show before and after surgery with carotid artery reconstruction.
