Abstract
Background:An institutional task force on upper gastrointestinal tumours is active at the European Institute of Oncology (EIO). Members decided to collate the institutional guidelines on management of liver tumours (primary and metastatic) into a document. This article is aimed at presenting the current treatment guidelines as well as ongoing research protocols and trials in this field at the EIO.Methods:A steering committee convened to assign tasks to individual members. Contributions from experts in each treatment area were collated in a single document, in order to produce a draft for subsequent review from the aforementioned committee. Six drafts have been discussed and the final version approved.Results:Surgical, medical oncology, interventional radiology, nuclear medicine and radiation therapy approaches, their roles in management of liver tumours and ongoing research trials are presented and discussed in this article.Conclusions:At the EIO a multi-disciplinary integrated approach to liver tumours is standard and several ongoing research projects are currently active in this field.
Highlights
Liver transplantation may overcome the problem of the low resectability rate in highly selected patients suffering from hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), but it has very limited applicability, and non-resectional therapies with palliative intent currently provide the mainstay of treatment
Combining hepatic resection with radiofrequency ablation can expand the number of patients who may be submitted to liver surgery, as larger lesions that are less effectively treated with ablation can be resected and small lesions can be ablated
Radiofrequency ablation has applicability in patients who do not meet the criteria for resectability but are candidates for liver-directed therapy based upon the presence of liver-only disease
Summary
Copyright: © the authors; licensee ecancermedicalscience. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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