For liver cancer patients, portal vein cancer embolism has been a big problem because it is not only difficult to treat, but also directly affects the prognosis of liver cancer patients, and may even directly lead to death of liver cancer patients. However, many people have heard of blood clots, but what is this cancer clot? It is also a bad thing that grows in blood vessels and can block blood supply, and is closely related to tumors. The reason why malignant tumor is dangerous is that on one hand, it grows uncontrollably and takes away most of the nutrients from human body; on the other hand, it is because it runs around, invades all around and metastasizes distantly. In the process of invasion, the tumor may also invade and corrode our blood vessels. “The patient will suffer more harm. Take liver cancer patients as an example, many advanced liver cancer patients often have huge tumors and portal vein cancer thrombus at the same time. As a result, the cancer embolus blocks the blood vessels, causing problems in blood supply to the liver and rapid failure of liver function; because the pressure change caused by the cancer embolus blocking the blood vessels, the patient will have more serious esophagus-fundus varices, which may cause acute haemorrhage leading to the patient’s death at any time; meanwhile, the cancer embolus “metastasizes” through the blood vessels. At the same time, the cancer embolus “metastasizes” through the blood vessels, while the patient is weakened by the problems caused by the cancer embolus, and the ascites worsens, eventually failing and dying. This dilemma once made doctors feel helpless, but now this problem can be solved by intervention. When it comes to interventional treatment and liver cancer, it has quite an origin. In liver cancer treatment, surgery is definitely the first option, but there are about 320,000 new cases of liver cancer in China every year, and more than 80% of them are in the middle and late stages, which lose the chance of surgery, and liver cancer is not very sensitive to traditional radiotherapy and chemotherapy, so interventional therapy has attracted people’s attention at this time. This is because, although the tumor grows rapidly, its growth also needs nutrients as well, and it needs to consume a lot of nutrients, which are supplied through blood, so tumor tissues often have richer blood supply support. This has given the medical profession a thought: since tumors need abundant blood supply to support their growth, can we cut off this point and let the tumors be “starved” to death? “Without blood supply, there is no tumor”, which is an important theoretical basis for tumor interventional therapy. From the clinical treatment situation, most of the liver cancer patients will shrink and become smaller soon after receiving interventional embolization treatment, without blood supply support. This treatment method is very mature nowadays, and it is even more common in liver cancer treatment. However, does it make sense for those patients with intermediate to advanced stage of the disease, who have developed cancerous emboli or huge tumors? The answer is yes. In fact, tumors need blood supply support, and so do cancer emboli. You don’t look at the cancer thrombus growing in blood vessels, but it still has its own blood supply pathway, and with the help of imaging and other methods, we can not only find the tumor-related blood vessels, but also lock the vascular pathway that supplies blood to these cancer thrombi. Once we find this pathway, the next step is simple – blocking and embolizing it, so that the cancer embolus, like the tumor, can slowly “starve” to death. According to the patients we have dealt with clinically, such a method has a “curative” effect on patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma with portal vein cancer embolism, and a small blockage can solve a big problem. Of course, besides interventional embolization for cancer embolism, we also cooperate with other treatments, for example, for patients with large cancer embolism that severely block the main trunk of portal vein and cause upper gastrointestinal bleeding, we embolize the varicose vein and implant a stent inside the cancer embolism to dilate the blood vessel, reduce the pressure and alleviate the varicose vein. If the patient also has a large tumor, we can also use a “small number of times” embolization approach to kill a part of the tumor each time and shorten the intervention interval. The benefit is to reduce the post-interventional response and to kill as many tumors as possible while maintaining the patient’s quality of life and liver function – i.e., to “destroy the enemy while preserving oneself”. As the tumor dies and the remaining normal liver compensates and proliferates, the patient’s liver function and physical condition will gradually improve, and he or she will be able to tolerate more treatment modalities, at which point the patient will embark on a virtuous cycle, further extending survival.