Liver Cancer

Treatment

Mayo Clinic offers a wide range of treatments for liver cancer. Your treatment will depend on the size, location and stage of the tumor, and whether it has spread.

Surgery

Surgery often offers the best chance for a cure. Surgery may involve removing (resecting) the diseased part of your liver to eliminate the cancer or transplant surgery to remove your liver and replace it with a donor's healthy liver.

At Mayo Clinic, you'll benefit from the expertise of experienced surgeons. For example:

• Surgeons at Mayo Clinic often use minimally invasive (laparoscopic) surgery for liver tumors, which requires only three or four small "keyhole" cuts to remove the tumor. This results in much less postoperative pain, a shorter hospital stay and a faster return to normal activities, compared with traditional open surgery.
• Mayo surgeons have been at the forefront of innovative transplant procedures, including living donor transplants.

Other therapies

If surgery is not an option, you may benefit from other therapies such as ablative therapies, which involve removing or destroying tumors by applying heat (radiofrequency ablation), cold (cryoablation) or chemicals to the tumors. Other options include injecting alcohol into the tumor, injecting chemotherapy drugs into the liver, radiation therapy and targeted drug therapy.

Mayo Clinic is a leader in new therapies. For example, Mayo helped pioneer radioembolization and is one of relatively few United States centers to offer it. Here's how it works.

• Doctors inject tiny, radioactive beads into a branch of the hepatic artery. Normal blood flow carries the beads to the tumor.
• The beads release a high dose of radiation over a period of 10 days to two weeks.
• By targeting the tumor through the hepatic artery, doctors spare your healthy liver tissue, allowing you to receive a higher radiation dose than you would get from a beam outside your body.