Liver Transplantation for Hepatocellular Carcinoma: A Single Center Resume Overlooking Four Decades of Experience

Figure 4

HCC morphology per treatment group (a) and tumor response to pretreatments (b) as measured in numbers of nondetectable, full-necrotic, or vital tumors. Percutaneous ethanol instillation (PEI) (), transarterial chemoembolisation (TACE) (), and surgery () were most frequently applied. Another major treatment group were patients that had been treated by a combination of PEI and TACE (). There were a significant higher number of uninodular tumors in the PEI group (71%) as compared to the TACE group (41%). The TACE group also had a significant higher proportion of multinodular tumors (52%) as compared to the PEI group (25%) and a higher proportion of multinodular/bilateral tumors, which was three times as high as compared to the PEI groups (26% to 9%, resp.). The pretreatment group surgery had the highest rate (45%) (10 of 22) of explanted livers without detectable tumor remnants, but this difference was statistically not significant as compared to the proportion of full-necrotic and nondetectable tumors () in the PEI group (Fisher’s exact test ). The PEI group and TACE group were comparable in terms of remaining vital tumor tissue (Fisher’s exact test ).

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(b)