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We read with interest the leading article by Gerbes et al 1 published in Gut. This roundtable meeting article proposed that hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) staging linked to first-line treatment indication can help clinicians guide patients through treatment decision-making process, patients and researchers need reliable ways to stage disease and predict prognosis. Controversies always exist during multidisciplinary team (MDT) decision-making for HCC patients within the Milan criteria (MC) due to the lack of evidence-based studies of composite multiparametric evaluations among the three potential curative therapies: liver transplantation (LT), liver resection (LR) and local ablation (LA).2–4 Herein, we retrospectively evaluated the efficacy of LT, LR and LA for HCC patients within the MC and explored an individualised assessment prediction model to assist with MDT decision-making. Institutional ethics committees approved the retrospective analyses of consecutive HCC patients admitted to two medical centres of Nankai University (Tianjin, China) between November 2011 and March 2016. A total of 283 HCC patients within the MC were finally enrolled and classified into LT (n=100), LR (n=89) and LA (n=94) groups based on the first-line treatments. Under the three treatment groups, subgroups were divided according to …