One hundred patients diagnosed with HCC between January 2004 and June 2006 in the Department of Hepatobiliary Surgery at the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi'an Jiaotong University were recruited in this investigation. Written informed consent was obtained from all patients and all protocols in this study were approved by the Xi'an Jiaotong University Ethics Committee according to the Helsinki Declaration of 1975. None of the patients enrolled in this study had undergone pre-operative chemotherapy or embolization. After routine diagnostic procedures, including X-ray, abdominal ultrasonography and computed tomography, all patients received surgical treatment, including curative resection for early HCC and palliative resection for advanced HCC. HCC samples and paired adjacent liver samples (> 2 cm distance from the margin of the resected tissue) were obtained during each liver resection and immediately fixed in paraformaldehyde for immunohistochemistry. Clinical data from these 100 HCC patients were collected from their medical records. An experienced pathologist performed the HCC diagnosis, Edmondson classification, clinical tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) grading and measured maximum tumor diameter. After surgery, all patients were followed for 15 to 120 months. Follow-up information was successfully obtained from 87 patients. The demographic features and clinicopathological data are presented in Table 1.
