Surgical Resection Versus Best Supportive Care for Resectable Hepatocellular Carcinoma Invading the First Branch of Portal Vein

Advances in surgical techniques have made it possible to remove all macroscopic tumors in more hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients with portal venous thrombus (PVTT). However, the benefit of such surgery remains largely controversial. On one hand, many clinicians believe that surgical resection offers the only chance for long term survival. Many studies reported a median survival of 6-40 months after liver resection and thrombectomy, and some cases achieved long term survival.On the other hand, the strength of evidences arising from these studies was widely questioned because of their retrospective nature and study design. Most of them were single arm cohort study. A few studies used control groups consisted of patients with unresectable HCC and PVTT underwent transarterial chemoembolization. This led to obvious selection bias. Because patients with unresectable HCC and PVTT have a much poorer prognosis compared with resectable disease because of more widespread tumor focus and less residual liver, even if their baseline characters are comparable.