Retrospective Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Hepatol. Feb 27, 2015; 7(2): 276-284
Published online Feb 27, 2015. doi: 10.4254/wjh.v7.i2.276
Post-transplantation hepatocellular carcinoma recurrence: Patterns and relation between vascularity and differentiation degree
Annarita Pecchi, Giulia Besutti, Mario De Santis, Cinzia Del Giovane, Sofia Nosseir, Giuseppe Tarantino, Fabrizio Di Benedetto, Pietro Torricelli
Annarita Pecchi, Giulia Besutti, Mario De Santis, Pietro Torricelli, Dipartimento di Diagnostica per Immagini, Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria Policlinico di Modena, 41124 Modena, Italy
Cinzia Del Giovane, Unità di Statistica Medica, Dipartimento di Medicina Diagnostica, Clinica e Sanità Pubblica, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, 41124 Modena, Italy
Sofia Nosseir, Dipartimento dei Laboratori, Anatomia Patologica e Medicina Legale, Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, 41124 Modena, Italy
Giuseppe Tarantino, Fabrizio Di Benedetto, Dipartimento Chirurgico, Medico, Odontoiatrico e di Scienze Morfologiche con interesse Trapiantologico, Oncologico e di Medicina Rigenerativa, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, 41124 Modena, Italy
Author contributions: Pecchi A, Besutti G, De Santis M and Torricelli P designed the study and reviewed imaging examinations; Nosseir S reviewed pathological reports; Del Giovane C carried out the statistical analysis; Tarantino G and Di Benedetto F provided all clinical information.
Ethics approval: This work has been carried out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (2000) of the World Medical Association.
Informed consent: All patients gave their verbal consent to the use of their data for scientific purposes at the moment of their admission to the Transplantation Department.
Conflict-of-interest: All authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.
Data sharing: Technical appendix, statistical code, and dataset available from the corresponding author at anna_pecchi@yahoo.com.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Dr. Annarita Pecchi, Dipartimento di Diagnostica per Immagini, Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria Policlinico di Modena, Via del Pozzo 71, 41124 Modena, Italy. anna_pecchi@yahoo.com
Telephone: +39-059-4225282 Fax: +39-059-4224290
Received: August 21, 2014
Peer-review started: August 23, 2014
First decision: November 14, 2014
Revised: December 16, 2014
Accepted: January 9, 2015
Article in press: Janurary 12, 2015
Published online: February 27, 2015
Processing time: 175 Days and 14.2 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: During hepatocarcinogenesis, besides the differentiation loss, blood supply changes occur. Recently, a correlation between higher histopathological grades and hypervascular dynamic-imaging enhancement pattern has been demonstrated. Hepatocellular carcinoma recurrence after transplantation is relatively common, however the issue of possible variations in imaging and histopathology between the primary and the recurrent tumor, and particularly the relationship between enhancement and grade changes, has never been investigated. We demonstrated a correlation between vascularity and pathological grade in a large population of transplanted patients, and some degree of variability between the primary and the recurrent tumor vascularity was found, though not associated with histopathological changes.