Liver surgery is not off-limits

  Patient Li, a 33-year-old male from Hainan Province, was diagnosed with primary liver cancer (giant type) locally 2 months ago, and the risk of surgical resection was so great that no treatment was performed at that time, and the patient later chose to be hospitalized in the Department of Hepatobiliary Surgery at our Huangpu Hospital. The tumor was located in the left liver, and the tumor was swelling around and had severely compressed the portal part of the liver, inferior vena cava, middle hepatic vein, right hepatic vein, as well as the anterior and caudal lobes of the right liver. However, the tumor envelope was still intact, except for a suspected satellite foci in the left liver, there was no clear intrahepatic metastasis in the right liver, and no distant metastasis was found after preoperative examination. The tumor grew downward, posteriorly, internally and externally, filling the left upper abdominal cavity, with extensive adhesions to the small curvature of the stomach and pancreas, the left hepatic vein was destroyed by the tumor, the middle hepatic vein and the beginning of the right hepatic vein were adjacent to the tumor and shifted forward to the right by the tumor compression, and the right side of the tumor The right side of the tumor had exceeded the right side of the inferior vena cava, and the relationship with the inferior vena cava was difficult to determine. However, the tumor envelope was still intact and no lymph node metastasis or metastasis was found in the abdominal cavity. Because of the huge tumor, it was difficult to free the right half of the liver and the third hepatic hilar, and the forced freeing would lead to tumor rupture and dissemination. After the discussion of the surgical team, the operation was considered feasible but extremely difficult. Combining with the preoperative CT and MRI analysis, it was decided to first separate the adhesions between the tumor and the left, upper, lower and posterior surrounding tissues outside the tumor envelope, and then adopt an anterior approach to cut the liver without freeing the right liver. The tumor was removed and the posthepatic inferior vena cava was completely revealed. The active bleeding in the liver section was treated in the same way. After resection of the left half of the liver and the tumor, the residual right half of the liver had good blood flow and reflux, and there was no active bleeding or bile leakage in the liver section. The operation lasted about 4 hours. Although the blood leakage in the field was serious during the intraoperative resection of the gallbladder and the separation of the hepatic tissues and tumor adhesions due to the high pressure of the collateral circulation of the portal vein spongiosa, the total bleeding was less than 1500 ml due to the reasonable surgical method (we usually lose about 100-500 ml of blood in various hepatectomies without blood transfusion, which indicates the difficulty of the operation in this case). The surgery was successful as expected.  It can be seen that as long as there is an indication for surgery, there is no forbidden area for liver surgery. As long as the preoperative evaluation, basic principles and careful planning are established, and the specific plan is determined according to the exploration results and the fine and feasible surgical operation techniques are adopted, successful resection can still be achieved in the end.