Review Article High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound Treatment for Advanced Pancreatic Cancer

permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Pancreatic cancer is under high mortality but has few effective treatment modalities. High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) is becoming an emerging approach of noninvasively ablating solid tumor in clinics. A variety of solid tumors have been tried on thousands of patients in the last fifteen years with great success. The principle, mechanism, and clinical outcome of HIFU were introduced first. All 3022 clinical cases of HIFU treatment for the advanced pancreatic cancer alone or in combination with chemotherapy or radiotherapy in 241 published papers were reviewed and summarized for its efficacy, pain relief, clinical benefit rate, survival, Karnofsky performance scale (KPS) score, changes in tumor size, occurrence of echogenicity, serum level, diagnostic assessment of outcome, and associated complications. Immune response induced by HIFU ablation may become an effective way of cancer treatment. Comments for a better outcome and current challenges of HIFU technology are also covered. 1. Pancreatic Cancer Pancreas is an essential gland organ in the digestive and endocrine system, producing hormones (i.e., insulin, glucagon, and somatostatin) into the bloodstream and secreting pancreatic juice to the small intestine or gut. Although pancreatic cancer is the twelfth most commo