Metastases are the main type of malignancy involving bone, which is the third most frequent site of metastatic carcinoma, after lung and liver. Skeletal-related events such as intractable pain, spinal cord compression, and pathologic fractures pose a serious burden on patients' quality of life. For this reason, mini-invasive treatments for the management of bone metastases were developed with the goal of pain relief and functional status improvement. These techniques include embolization, thermal ablation, electrochemotherapy, cementoplasty, and MRI-guided high-intensity focused ultrasound. In order to achieve durable pain palliation and disease control, mini-invasive procedures are combined with chemotherapy, radiation therapy, surgery, or analgesics. The purpose of this review is to summarize the recently published literature regarding interventional radiology procedures in the treatment of cancer patients with bone metastases, focusing on the efficacy, complications, local disease control and recurrence rate.
Keywords: ablation techniques; bone metastases; embolization; high-intensity focused ultrasound ablation; imaging; interventional radiology.