A Prospective Randomized Controlled Trial of Complete Versus Selective HepaticVascular Clamping in Hepatectomy

From recent animal studies, it can be easily concluded that I/R injury of the liver may be a significant factor, which can promote the primary liver tumor recurrence and metastasis. If it is a truth in human, there must be a big challenge to the Pringle maneuver which was adopted routinely in hepatectomy in the past years. Pringle maneuver during hepatic resection may do harm to the liver function, make the tumor cell more aggressive and tend to recurrence. It is suggested that further strategies may be needed for the prevention and treatment of I/R injury ,early and late recurrences.Selective hepatic vascular clamping (SVC)such as hemihepatic vascular occlusion have been used to minimize ischemic injury during liver surgery, especially in patients with abnormal liver parenchyma. However,these procedure used is likely to depend on the surgeon's training or preference rather than on objective data, there is not any further reported data or RCT studies conducted about the postoperative outcome ,especially liver function.To address these issues,we designed a prospective randomized controlled trial comparing the complete hepatic vascular clamping (Pringle maneuver) and selective hepatic vascular clamping ( portal vein or hemi-hepatic occlusion) in patients undergoing hepatectomy. The main objective was to compare the liver I/R injury of two procedures to the postoperative liver function. The secondary objective was to evaluate the feasibility, safety, efficacy, amount of hemorrhage,postoperative complications ,disease-free and overall survival rate of the 2 procedures.