Review
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2017. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastrointest Surg. Dec 27, 2017; 9(12): 233-245
Published online Dec 27, 2017. doi: 10.4240/wjgs.v9.i12.233
Advances and challenges in laparoscopic surgery in the management of hepatocellular carcinoma
Ioannis A Ziogas, Georgios Tsoulfas
Ioannis A Ziogas, Medical School, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki 54453, Greece
Georgios Tsoulfas, Associate Professor of Surgery, 1st Department of Surgery, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki 54453, Greece
Author contributions: Ziogas IA and Tsoulfas G contributed to all aspects of this work.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare no conflict of interests for this article.
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: Georgios Tsoulfas, MD, PhD, 1st Department of Surgery, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 66 Tsimiski Street, Thessaloniki 54453, Greece. tsoulfasg@auth.gr
Telephone: +30-69-71895190 Fax: +30-23-10332022
Received: September 19, 2017
Peer-review started: September 21, 2017
First decision: October 31, 2017
Revised: November 4, 2017
Accepted: December 5, 2017
Article in press: December 5, 2017
Published online: December 27, 2017
Processing time: 98 Days and 7.3 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: Hepatocellular carcinoma is the most common primary malignant tumor of the liver and fifth most common malignancy worldwide. Surgical resection is the therapeutic treatment of choice and its laparoscopic version has come into play since 1992. Several matched comparative studies reported its superiority over open resection regarding operating theatre time and hospital stay, blood loss, need for transfusion and postsurgical opioid analgesics, postoperative pain, morbidity, R0 resection, time to recuperation, time to oral intake and stress response. The high costs of the procedure are offset by the decrease in the length of the operation and hospital stay, while in experienced hands conversion rates and morbidity are even more diminished. Laparoscopic and robotic liver resection is a continuously evolving field of minimally invasive liver surgery with a very promising future.