How to improve HCC surveillance outcomes

Outside of expert centres, surveillance programmes for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) are not well executed. There are deficiencies in every stage of the process. Overcoming these obstacles is the most important method for improving surveillance. However, even if these obstacles were overcome, there would still be room for improvement. Assessing who is at risk of developing HCC remains incompletely validated. At present, risk scores have been developed for different causes of liver disease, but scores developed in different parts of the world for the same disease do not always agree. Furthermore, most scores stratify patients by risk but do not examine what level of risk should trigger surveillance. Which surveillance tools to use remains controversial – schemes have been proposed that use biomarkers alone, ultrasound alone, or a combination of both. However, the requisite level of test sensitivity that would be associated with high cure rates has not been defined, so at this point it is not clear whether surveillance requires both ultrasound and biomarkers, or whether the use of biomarkers alone is sufficient. Finally, surveillance should result in the identification of HCC at a very early stage. Diagnosing these lesions is difficult and optimal algorithms for lesions that are atypical on radiology have yet to be developed. Algorithms for the follow-up of abnormal biomarkers in the absence of ultrasound have also not been developed yet.