The Hospital of the University of Rome – Sapienza (LSR) is a 1000 beds tertiary care center. With regards to liver tumours, the hospital has a Liver Transplantation and Surgery Programme, which is a participating center of the European Liver Transplant Registry, and a Center for Chronic Liver Disease and Hepatocellular Carcinoma with more than 2500 patients in follow-up. The Department of Radiological Sciences houses a Division of Interventional Radiology and an MR-guided Focused Ultrasound Unit.
The staff at LSR has extensive knowledge of the role of MR and other cross-sectional imaging techniques in diagnosis and staging of primary and secondary liver tumours. There is also a strong experience in imaging tumoral response to treatment, with both morphological and functional studies.The Interventional Radiology Unit has a 30 year experience in image guided therapy, including the non-invasive management of liver tumor with chemoembolization, radiofrequency ablation and microwave ablation. The MRgFUS team has competence in the management of patients with uterine fibroides, primary and secondary bone tumours, and prostate cancer, with over 200 patients treated.
The Department of Radiological Sciences will be in a unique position to be the clinical site to test the application of the tools developed in the TRANS-FUSIMO project for MRgFUS of the liver.

Key staff:

Mario Bezzi, MD, Agg. Professor of Radiology, Department of Radiological Sciences at LSR. Interventional and oncologic radiologist working in the field of liver and biliary neoplasms for 20 years. Involved in preclinical and clinical trials on the use of biliary stents and embolic particles for chemoembolization of the liver in HCC (SPACE trial). In charge of the programme for non-invasive management of liver tumors with percutaneous interventions. He is named on more than 100 publications and more than 200 oral and poster presentations. He is in the Executive Committee of the Cardiovascular and Interventional Society of Europe (CIRSE). In the last 2 years has joined a Departmental Project on the therapeutic applications of MR guided FUS.

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