Modeling Cancer-specific Prognosis in Liver Transplantation for Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC) With Pre-transplant Radiology Assessment and Alpha-fetoprotein (α-fp)

Rationale: Liver transplantation (LT) is one of the curative treatment options for patients with HCC associated to chronic liver disease (cirrhosis). All current international guidelines recommend LT for HCC only within pre-defined criteria.

The use of restrictive criteria to select patients affected by HCC for LT was originally proposed with the Milan criteria. These criteria were based on pathologic assessment of number and size of the HCC nodules on the explanted liver. Subsequently, many authors proposed the expansion of such restrictive criteria (e.g. UCSF, Tumour Volume, Up-To-Seven etc.). All these attempts, based on different combinations of morphologic parameters, have been defined on the pathologic staging of the tumor made on the removed liver, namely after LT, once decision on treatment and treatment itself could not be changed.

Over time, various attempts have also been made to correlate postoperative pathologic findings of HCC to preoperative clinical staging in order to anticipate decision-making. Should a reliable conversion algorithm correlating pre-operative staging with post-transplant prognosis be available a selection of LT candidates based on routine radiologic HCC findings would optimise survival patient survival and organ resource allocation.

Although post-LT pathology / pre-LT radiology correlation have improved over time, significant biases still affect clinical assessment of HCC stage and no reliable protocols has entered clinical practice yet. In addition, robust evidence indicates that other biological markers of aggressiveness (such as α-Fetoprotein levels and clinical response to bridge therapies) have to be added when evaluating pre-operative variables.

Another important issue to be considered when dealing with LT for HCC is the striking progress in treating chronic viral infections (HCV and HBV) that has been achieved over the last few years. Due to the possibility of treating recurrence of viral infections in the transplanted liver, these conditions do not significantly affect mortality following LT as they did in the past.