Overcome intraoperative difficulties of ALPPS procedure: a single-center outcomes and technical experience

Abstract

Backgrounds/aims: Recently, the ALPPS (Associating liver partition and portal vein ligation for staged hepatectomy) has become widely known to achieve hepatic resection by rapid future liver remnant hypertrophy, but it comes with intraoperative difficulties, followed by increased complications. This study aimed to report the outcomes of an oncology center in a low-income and middle-income country with ALPPS in patients with liver tumors and its technical variants, which were invented to overcome intraoperative difficulties of the ALPPS procedure. Patients and methods: A retrospective analysis of patients undergoing ALPPS from September 2022 to December 2023 was performed. Results: A total of 25 patients underwent the ALPPS procedure: 21 procedures for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), 3 combined hepatocellular-cholangiocarcinoma (cHCC-CCA), and 1 for small cell neuroendocrine carcinoma (SNEC). The mean postoperative stay was 29.6 ± 9.3 days (range 16–58 days). After stage 1, we counted 8 complications, all of grade II; after stage 2, the number of complications was decreased to 3:2 were of grade I and 1 were of grade IIIB. 3 (12%) patients failed to proceed to ALPPS stage 2. After a median follow-up of 9 months (range 2–25), disease recurrence has been recorded in 3 patients (12%), while 1 patient (4%) died, affected by HCC. The entire group’s 2-year overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS) were 83.3% and 82.5%, respectively. Conclusion: The ALPPS procedure is an approach for large liver tumors with small future liver remnant with acceptable OS and DFS in a low-income and middle-income country.