Many people may think that in addition to cutting down the cancerous mass during the incision, the normal tissues around the cancerous mass are also removed; when more and more normal tissues are removed around the cancer, the larger the scope is, so that it will not be completely cut down. The surgeons at that time thought the same way. To address the problem of recurrence after surgery, wouldn’t it be possible to avoid recurrence by expanding the scope of surgery and cutting as much as possible, or by improving surgical skills and innovating surgical methods? However, the answer is no. Let’s look at the historical changes of surgical excision of breast cancer. In the late 19th century, Halsted, an American oncologist, created the classic “radical mastectomy”. In the 1950s, it was customary to expand the surgical excision to reduce the postoperative recurrence rate, so various expanded procedures such as removal of internal breast lymph nodes, supraclavicular lymph nodes, and mediastinal lymph nodes were added to the classic radical breast cancer surgery. However, the results of many prospective randomized controlled studies showed that this “expanded radical surgery” did not improve the outcome compared to the previous classical radical surgery. In the 1970s, it became clear that breast cancer was a systemic disease to begin with, and that enlarging the scope of resection alone would not reduce the risk of recurrence. As a result, the scope of surgical excision began to be reduced, resulting in “modified radical surgery” and today’s “breast-conserving surgery” – minimal excision. The reason for this is that breast cancer can spread through the bloodstream even in its early stages. “Early” means that the cancer is small, and even if it is small, the cancer cells can enter the bloodstream. Once there are cancer cells in the blood, it is not a local disease but a systemic disease, and it is not useful to use the local excision method. This is also the case for liver cancer. The staging and treatment strategy of hepatocellular carcinoma proposed by Barcelona Liver Cancer Group, a very authoritative liver cancer treatment guideline in the world, points out that a single hepatocellular carcinoma less than 2cm in diameter is “very early stage”, which is earlier than “early stage”. “If portal pressure or bilirubin is elevated and there is no associated disease, then liver transplantation is recommended. In other words, the small cancerous mass together with the whole liver will be removed and replaced with a new liver in one pot, which can be quite extensive. However, it still cannot completely stop the cancer from recurring, only that the recurrence rate is relatively low and the risk of recurrence is small. Therefore simply expanding the scope of surgical resection does not reduce the postoperative recurrence rate, let alone stop recurrence.