摘要
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a kind of malignancy with high potential of metastasis and multicentric occurrence. The treatment of recurrent hepatocellular carcinoma (RHCC) and multinodular hepatocellular carcinoma (MHCC) is always a nodus because of the diverse clonal origin of RHCC/MHCC. Theoretically, the RHCC/MHCC can originate from intrahepatic metastasis (IM type) or multicentric occurrence (MO type). Our previous study proposed that there are at least 6 subtypes of clonal origin patterns in RHCC. RHCC and MHCC with different clonal origins have variant biological behaviors, clinical prognosis as well as treatment strategy. Generally speaking, patients with IM type HCC have a poorer prognosis compared with those with MO type HCC. Therefore, it is essential to emphasize the distribution of the clonal origin in HCC in order to determine the choice of clinical treatment. Undoubtedly, the detection of clonal origin pattern will become a promising breakthrough in the molecular pathological diagnosis of HCC. We should attach more attention to the establishment of a standardized molecular pathological clonal origin detection method and a new stratification of clinical treatment choice for RHCC/MHCC in future.
