Surgical Stages of Liver Cirrhosis In Patients With Hepatocellular Carcinoma

The investigators intend to perform a prospective, multicenter study to establish a set of clinical criteria for surgical stages of liver cirrhosis, which can be implemented to guide the surgical treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC).

HCC is the fifth most common malignancy in the world and ranks the third leading cause of tumor-related mortality. In China, more than 80% of HCC patients are accompanied by liver cirrhosis. Varied degrees of cirrhosis not only play an important role in selecting appropriate operative interventions for HCC patients, but are closely associated with tumor recurrence and long-term survival as well. Therefore, evaluating cirrhotic severity is essential for individualizing surgical modalities and predicting outcomes for patients with HCC. In recent years, investigators' group has proposed to stage the severity of liver cirrhosis through intraoperative liver morphological changes and preoperative cirrhotic severity scoring (TJ-CSS) model. Although the morphological classification of liver cirrhosis is of guiding significance for surgeons to determine the extent of hepatectomy, this method has some defects, such as subjectivity, lack of specific quantitative indicators and so on. Based on this, investigators propose to evaluate the severity of liver cirrhosis by measuring liver stiffness directly by Shaw hardmeter. Therefore, this prospective, multicenter clinical study intends to modify and perfect the preoperative cirrhotic severity scoring (TJ-CSS) and direct measurement of liver stiffness (DMS) grade established in the early period, so as to build a set of clinical standards for surgical liver cirrhosis classification, which can be used to guide the surgical treatment of HCC.