A farewell to Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer (BCLC) classification for hepatocellular carcinoma.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common primary liver cancer with expected increasing frequency in the next few decades. At early stages, HCC is curable, with most common therapeutic modalities to include surgical resection and liver transplantation. The Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer (BCLC) Staging System is widely adopted tool to guide the therapeutic algorithms of patients with HCC. This classification is guiding the clinical practice for the last 2 decades. However, there are emerging data demonstrating that patients beyond the traditional criteria of operability, resectability or transplantability actually can benefit from surgical treatment, emphasizing the need of refinement or even change of current BCLC criteria.