Role of Interventional Radiology in Endocrine Diseases-

Nowadays, interventional procedures have been opened new horizons in the medicine. They constitute wide spectrum procedures from diagnosis to treatment in different medical disciplines. Various tissue samplings, specific intravascular samplings, different intravascular interventions in central and peripheral vascular systems for congenital and acquired vascular pathologies and complications [including neurointerventions], musculoskeletal interventional procedures and vast field of oncointerventions are examples of the long list of interventional radiology field. Similar to all medical fields, interventional radiology has been introduced and developed in the field of endocrinology. In this regard, interventional techniques have been used for intravascular blood samplings in specific vascular beds [for determination of hormonal level assessments] and different ablation methods in endocrine neoplasms [including metastatic malignancies and adenomas]. In this review paper, we are going to describe a brief on the application of Abstract Recently, a number of procedures for interventional radiology diagnosis and treatment have been developed by the radiologists. The „Interventional Radiology‟ refers to the therapeutic procedures performed under imaging guidance. The emergence of this specialty has been made possible by a lot of advances in the technology, imaging systems, and radiologists experience. Interventional radiologists are physicians who are experienced in minimally invasive procedures and targeted treatments which have less risk, less pain and less recovery time in comparison with the surgery. Minimizing the patient discomfort, avoid of general anesthesia, lower incidence of morbidity and mortality, and decreases the length and cost of hospitalization are some advantages of interventional radiology procedures. Similar to all medical fields, interventional procedures have been introduced and developed for the diagnosis and treatment of endocrinology procedures. In this article we aim to review and report our experience about the role of interventional radiology in venous sampling for endocrine diseases (such as parathyroid venous sampling, inferior petrosal sinus sampling, adrenal venous sampling, and venous sampling for islet cell tumors). In addition, interventional treatments of neuroendocrine cancer metastases to the liver, percutaneous ethanol injection therapy for secondary hyperparathyroidism, treatment of hyperfunctioning thyroid nodules by percutaneous ethanol injection, radiofrequency ablation of the adrenal gland neoplasms, and also establishing a cGMP pancreatic islet processing facility have been discussed in this article.