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PURPOSE: This study is to evaluate the Hangzhou criteria (HC) for patients with HCC undergoing surgical resection and to identify whether this staging system is superior to other staging systems in predicting the survival of resectable HCC. METHOD: 774 HCC patients underwent surgical resection between 2007 and 2009 in West China Hospital were enrolled retrospectively. Predictors of survival were identified using the Kaplan-Meier method and the Cox model. The disease state was staged by the HC, as well as by the TNM and BCLC staging systems. Prognostic powers were quantified using a linear trend χ2 test, c-index, and the likelihood ratio (LHR) χ2 test and correlated using Cox's regression model adjusted using the Akaike information criterion (AIC). RESULTS: Serum AFP level (P = 0.02), tumor size (P

AIM: The selection criteria for patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) to undergo liver transplantation should accurately predict posttransplant recurrence while not denying potential beneficiaries. In the present study, we attempted to identify risk factors associated with posttransplant recurrence and to expand the selection criteria. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Adult patients with HCC who underwent liver transplantation between November 2004 and September 2012 at our centre were recruited into the current study (N = 241). Clinical and pathological data were retrospectively reviewed. Patients who died during the perioperative period or died of non-recurrence causes were excluded from this study (N = 25). All potential risk factors were analysed using uni- and multi-variate analyses. RESULTS: Sixty-one recipients of 216 qualified patients suffered from recurrence. Similar recurrence-free and long-term survival rates were observed between living donor liver transplant recipients (N = 60) and deceased donor liver transplant recipients (N = 156). Total tumour volume (TTV) and preoperative percentage of lymphocytes (L%) were two independent risk factors in the multivariate analysis. We propose a prognostic score model based on these two risk factors. Patients within our criteria achieved a similar recurrence-free survival to patients within the Milan criteria. Seventy-one patients who were beyond the Milan criteria but within our criteria also had comparable survival to patients within the Milan criteria. CONCLUSIONS: TTV and L% are two risk factors that contribute to posttransplant recurrence. Selection criteria based on these two factors, which are proposed by our study, expanded the Milan criteria without increasing the risk of posttransplant recurrence.

Background: The scarcity of grafts available necessitates a system that considers expected posttransplant survival, in addition to pretransplant mortality as estimated by the MELD. So far, however, conventional linear techniques have failed to achieve sufficient accuracy in posttransplant outcome prediction. In this study, we aim to develop a pretransplant predictive model for liver recipients' survival with benign end-stage liver diseases (BESLD) by a nonlinear method based on pretransplant characteristics, and compare its performance with a BESLD-specific prognostic model (MELD) and a generalillness severity model (the sequential organ failure assessment score, or SOFA score). Methodology/Principal Findings: With retrospectively collected data on 360 recipients receiving deceased-donor transplantation for BESLD between February 1999 and August 2009 in the west China hospital of Sichuan university, we developed a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) network to predict one-year and two-year survival probability after transplantation. The performances of the MLP, SOFA, and MELD were assessed by measuring both calibration ability and discriminative power, with Hosmer-Lemeshow test and receiver operating characteristic analysis, respectively. By the forward stepwise selection, donor age and BMI; serum concentration of HB, Crea, ALB, TB, ALT, INR, Na+; presence of pretransplant diabetes; dialysis prior to transplantation, and microbiologically proven sepsis were identified to be the optimal input features. The MLP, employing 18 input neurons and 12 hidden neurons, yielded high predictive accuracy, with c-statistic of 0.91 (P<0.001) in one-year and 0.88 (P<0.001) in two-year prediction. The performances of SOFA and MELD were fairly poor in prognostic assessment, with c-statistics of 0.70 and 0.66, respectively, in one-year prediction, and 0.67 and 0.65 in two-year prediction. Conclusions/Significance: The posttransplant prognosis is a multidimensional nonlinear problem, and the MLP can achieve significantly high accuracy than SOFA and MELD scores in posttransplant survival prediction. The pattern recognition methodologies like MLP hold promise for solving posttransplant outcome prediction [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Aims: The number of people undergoing living donor liver transplantation (LDLT) has increased rapidly in many transplant centres. Patients considering LDLT need to know whether LDLT is riskier than deceased donor liver transplantation (DDLT). The aim of this study was to compare the outcomes of patients undergoing LDLT versus DDLT. Methods: A total of 349 patients with benign liver diseases were recruited from 2005 to 2011 for this study. LDLT was performed in 128 patients, and DDLT was performed in 221 patients. Pre- and intra-operative variables for the two groups were compared. Statistically analysed post-operative outcomes include the postoperative incidence of complication, biliary and vascular complication, hepatitis B virus (HBV) recurrence, long-term survival rate and outcomes of emergency transplantation. Results: The waiting times were 22.10±15.31 days for the patients undergoing LDLT versus 35.81±29.18 days for the patients undergoing DDLT. The cold ischemia time (CIT) was 119.34±19.75 minutes for the LDLT group and 346±154.18 for DDLT group. LDLT group had higher intraoperative blood loss, but red blood cell (RBC) transfusion was not different. Similar ≥ Clavien III complications, vascular complications, hepatitis B virus (HBV) recurrence and long-term survival rates were noted. LDLT patients suffered a higher incidence of biliary complications in the early postoperative days. However, during the long-term follow-up period, biliary complication rates were similar between the two groups. The long-term survival rate of patients undergoing emergency transplantation was lower than of patients undergoing elective transplantation. However, no significant difference was observed between emergency LDLT and emergency DDLT. Conclusions: Patients undergoing LDLT achieved similar outcomes to patients undergoing DDLT. Although LDLT patients may suffer a higher incidence of early biliary complications, the total biliary complication rate was similar during the longterm follow-up period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]