1. Acute or chronic disease Whether cancer is an acute or chronic disease is a long debated issue. Different perceptions will lead to different treatment strategies. Cancer is a “terminal disease”, and liver cancer is a terminal disease with an acute turn, with a natural average survival period of 4-6 months. A 2010 article in Nature magazine said that “the course of pancreatic cancer evolves over at least 20 years” and that it takes about 11.7 years for a primary tumor to develop without metastasis from a genetic mutation, 6.8 years for a genetically mutated tumor to acquire the ability to metastasize, and about 2 years for a metastasis to spread and cause death. It takes about 2.7 years for the tumor to spread and cause death of the patient. Therefore, the patients we see in the clinic are actually in the advanced stage. Therefore, cancer is a chronic disease. 2. Cancer is a localized disease, but also a systemic disease The understanding of cancer as a localized disease has been reflected in the practice of anti-cancer treatment for nearly a century. In the early days, cancer was treated locally, and surgical resection, interventional therapy (arterial chemoembolization) and local ablation therapy (freezing, radiofrequency, microwave, etc.) were all targeted at the local tumor. However, more and more evidence suggests that cancer is a systemic disease. The development of cancer is the result of the interaction between environmental factors (physical, chemical, biological and other carcinogenic factors), organism (genetic, neurological, endocrine, immune, metabolic, etc.) and microenvironment. 3.Cancer metastasis is not a late phenomenon Clinically, the more advanced the metastasis is, the more it occurs. In fact, genetic changes related to cancer metastasis occur at the stage of primary tumor, and there is no significant difference between small liver cancer and large liver cancer metastasis. In clinical practice, we often find that for liver cancer less than 2cm, the cancer cells have invaded into the blood vessels of portal vein. Metastasis is the most essential feature of cancer.