What tests should be done for liver cancer

Liver cancer is a malignant tumor disease that is difficult to treat. Patients with this disease often have symptoms of liver pain. Some patients do not have liver cancer at all, but are diagnosed as liver cancer patients during examinations in the hospital. This is a common occurrence. Therefore, examinations are very important for patients with liver cancer. The following examinations must be done to make a final diagnosis.

How to diagnose liver cancer? The most commonly used one is imaging examination. The progress of medical imaging examination methods has provided a reliable imaging basis for the diagnosis of liver cancer and follow-up after treatment.

1. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI): In liver cancer, T1 and T2 relaxation times are prolonged. In more than half of cases, the tumor shows lower or equal signal intensity than the surrounding liver tissue on the T1-weighted image, while it shows high signal intensity on the T1-weighted image.

2. CT: Among various imaging examinations, CT can best reflect the pathological morphology of the liver, such as the size, shape, location, number of lesions, and the presence or absence of hemorrhage and necrosis within the lesions. The invasiveness of the lesions can be understood from the edge of the lesions, and the invasion of the portal vein can be understood from the cancer thrombus and invasion of the portal vein. CT is considered to be the preferred non-invasive diagnostic method to supplement ultrasound imaging to estimate the extent of the lesions.

3. Real-time ultrasound imaging (US): Ultrasound imaging is widely used in clinical practice for its high sensitivity in showing lesions of solid soft tissue organs and its low impact on human tissues, as well as its low cost. As small liver cancer gradually grows, ultrasound imaging shows that the internal echo changes from low echo to high echo and mixed echo. Tumors with a diameter of less than 2 cm often have low echo nodules; those with a diameter of 2 to 3 cm show low echoes at the same frequency as the surrounding echoes; those with a diameter of 3 to 5 cm are mostly peripheral low echoes; and those with a diameter of more than 5 cm are mostly high echoes or mixed echoes.

Experts pointed out that despite the continuous development of imaging diagnostic technologies such as MRI, CT and US, there are still many limitations in accurately diagnosing and carefully evaluating liver cancer. This is also a research topic for disease diagnosis in the future.