It can start as skin, lung or bone cancer, but when it's not stopped early, many cancers spread to the liver. Traditionally, once the disease hits the liver, patients are given less than a year to live.  Now a new experimental approach is blasting the organ with chemo while sparing the rest of the body.  The approach turned one man's grim prognosis upside down. 

It's a story made for the movies. Retired navy fighter pilot Chris "Boomer" Wilson was one of the inspirations behind "Top Gun."  Now he's an inspiration for cancer patients everywhere.

Wilson was diagnosed with melanoma, which spread to his liver.

"I knew enough about melanoma to know that if it metastasized, I was in big trouble." Wilson told Ivanhoe. "I was originally given a prognosis of 3 to 9 months.

He sought out Dr. Mark Faries, who was experimenting with a new treatment called percutaneous hepatic perfusion.

"PHP is a treatment that allows us to give very high doses of chemotherapy but keep them largely confined to the liver" Dr. Faries, associate member at the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica, Calif., told Ivanhoe.

Dr. Faries uses catheters to deliver 10 times the normal amount of chemo directly to the liver. Two balloons block the chemo from flowing through the rest of the body. The blood that does touch the chemo is filtered out, cleansed and pumped back in.

"So we can use enough chemotherapy to actually kill the tumor," Dr. Faries explained. "The other advantage is it spares the rest of the body much of the exposure."

In one study, nearly 80 percent of patients saw their tumors shrink or stabilize. After three treatments, Wilson's tumors shrank by more than 60 percent, and doctors say what's left is fading.

"It's like someone tells you you're gonna die in a month, and then the next day the same guy comes to you and says no you're not -- false start," Wilson said.

PHP is in the final phase of testing. Traditional treatment for metastatic liver cancer includes surgery and IV chemotherapy, but Dr. Faries says the success rate for those treatments is about 10 percent.