Pancreatic carcinoma (PC) is the deadliest malignant tumors worldwide. Surgical resection is one of the most effective methods for the treatment of PC, but the resectable rate is less than 20% among the patients with PCs, and the recurrent and metastatic rate is more than 80% in two years after resection. Furthermore, it is difficult to achieve tumoral complete responses by traditional therapies including chemotherapy, radiotherapy and transarterial embolization. Ablation has been confirmed one of the most effective methods for solid tumors by recent twenty years and proven to be a radical treatment similar to the surgical resection for the clinical applications of hepatic and renal tumors at early clinical staging in the internationally guidelines. However, the published clinical practices on the thermal ablation of PCs with large-scale cases are rare. One of the most important reasons for this originates from the extreme complexity and difficult regulation of the temperature distribution in tumors during thermal ablation because of the own characteristics of PCs, including highly invasive growth without tumoral capsules, high proportion of the interstitial fiber tissue, and the unusual blood perfusion because of extremely chaotic microvascular structures. The purpose is to explore the efficacy and safety of microwave ablation in the treatment of pancreatic cancer in combination with systematic therapy.
