Retrospective Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Dec 14, 2015; 21(46): 13101-13112
Published online Dec 14, 2015. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v21.i46.13101
Cyberknife treatment for advanced or terminal stage hepatocellular carcinoma
Hiroyuki Kato, Hideo Yoshida, Hiroyoshi Taniguch, Ryutaro Nomura, Kengo Sato, Ichiro Suzuki, Ryo Nakata
Hiroyuki Kato, Hideo Yoshida, Hiroyoshi Taniguch, Ryo Nakata, Department of Gastroenterology, Japanese Red Cross Medical Center, Tokyo 150-8935, Japan
Ryutaro Nomura, Kengo Sato, Ichiro Suzuki, Cyberknife Center, Japanese Red Cross Medical Center, Tokyo 150-8935, Japan
Author contributions: Kato H wrote the manuscript; Yoshida H, Taniguch H, Nomura R, Sato K, Suzuki I and Nakata R contributed to the manuscript discussion and reviewed the manuscript.
Institutional review board statement: The study was reviewed and approved by the institutional review board of the Japanese Red Cross Medical Center. All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008.
Informed consent statement: All study participants, or their legal guardian, provided informed written consent prior to study enrollment.
Conflict-of-interest statement: We have no financial relationships to disclose.
Data sharing statement: The statistical code and dataset are available from the corresponding author at hiroyuki.kato.911@gmail.com. Consent for data sharing was not obtained but the presented data are anonymized and risk of identification is low.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Hiroyuki Kato, MD, Department of Gastroenterology, Japanese Red Cross Medical Center, 4-1-22 Hiroo, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-8935, Japan. hiroyuki.kato.911@gmail.com
Telephone: +81-3-34001311 Fax: +81-3-34091604
Received: May 30, 2015
Peer-review started: June 5, 2015
First decision: September 9, 2015
Revised: September 25, 2015
Accepted: October 23, 2015
Article in press: October 26, 2015
Published online: December 14, 2015
Core Tip

Core tip: Due to an aging of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patient population, a growing number of patients are ineligible for conventional therapy. The Cyberknife® system delivers stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT), which offers minimally invasive treatment with high doses of radiation. There has been an increase in the number of successful reports of using SBRT against liver-confined HCC. We found that the Cyberknife can safely be administered even in patients with advanced or terminal stage HCC. Our results suggest that SBRT may have the potential to increase the overall survival for advanced stage HCC patients. High alpha fetoprotein levels were associated with worse survival, but a higher radiation dose improved the survival.