Interventional radiologists: From biopsies to curing cancer

If you’ve ever been diagnosed with a serious illness or experienced a significant injury, you know that the care you receive comes from a variety of doctors and other care providers. While your primary doctor is your partner in helping you navigate your care, there are specialists who play a key role in your healing. For many, interventional radiologists are among those highly skilled physicians.

“Interventional radiologists perform minimally invasive procedures using a series of different needles, wires and tools under imaging guidance — such as ultrasound, CT, MRI or similar technologies,” says Dr. Hamed Aryafar, a board-certified interventional radiologist affiliated with Sharp Memorial Hospital. “We manage navigating into the body, using our tools to perform different tasks, without doing open surgery.”

Leaving as little a footprint as possible

Dr. Aryafar and his colleague, board-certified interventional radiologist Dr. Aaron Smith, along with a team of interventional radiologists at Sharp Memorial can be found performing a variety of procedures. Unlike some specialties, Dr. Aryafar says each interventional radiologist must be a “jack-of-all-trades.”

“Interventional radiology encompasses the best of multiple worlds,” Dr. Aryafar says. “It’s a highly technical field involving anything from a simple biopsy to curing cancer in patients, all with the intention of ‘less is more,’ because none of our procedures involve large incisions — they’re all low impact on the patient.”

What’s more, recovery from an interventional radiology (IR) procedure is very quick. Patients can be back on their feet within hours.

“It’s a very elegant specialty because you don’t have to cut someone open,” Dr. Smith adds. “We can accomplish a lot of what can be done in surgery, however in IR it is very, minimally invasive.”

Knowing every organ in the body

According to Dr. Smith, interventional radiologists do everything from performing biopsies to get samples of tissue so that pathologists can determine what kind of cancer a patient has, to curing that cancer through embolization or ablation procedures. And if a person has an infection, an interventional radiologist can put in a drain to remove infectious fluid from their body without performing surgery.

“We do procedures for people who have blood clots or bad blood vessels in their legs, opening them to improve blood flow,” Dr. Smith says. “When there are traumas and someone is bleeding, we can go in and do an embolization to stop the bleeding. If someone is having a stroke due to a blood clot or blood clots in their lungs, we can do a thrombectomy and pull those clots out.”

Some interventionalist radiologists specialize in various treatments. For example, one of Dr. Aryafar’s specialties involves arteriovenous malformation embolization, when patients have vascular irregularities that need to be addressed.

“It’s often very difficult to fix surgically,” he says. “We navigate to those areas and close off the abnormal blood vessels for them.”

Dr. Aryafar also offers hybrid orthopedic procedures for palliative care patients that aren’t candidates for surgery due to having advanced cancer, advanced age or other conditions. “We can repair pelvic fractures — or fractures in other areas — to reduce patients’ pain so they can become mobile again.”

Dr. Smith specializes in prostate artery embolization. This involves working with patients who have large prostates and have difficulty urinating. “We can make the vast majority of our patients better — sometimes, very quickly,” he says.

The most rewarding part of being an interventional radiologist, both doctors say, is being able to perform procedures on patients and fix their problem with as little a footprint as possible. “We fix major issues and patients can go home with a Band-Aid,” Dr. Aryafar says.

“We’re not just treating the heart, the brain, the blood vessels or the liver,” Dr. Smith adds. “We are treating all of it. We have to know about all of the organs and the diseases. There are a lot of patients with various illnesses, and we are treating them all.”

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