Ahmed Zidan

By Ahmed Zidan and Wei-Chen Lee

Liver transplantation is the most effective treatment for the patients with acute liver failure or end-stage liver diseases. Liver transplantation is also indicated for patients with hepatocellular carcinoma to yield a best result if the tumor/tumors meet Milan criteria, University of California San Francisco(UCSF) criteria, or up-to-seven criteria. It is no doubt that more and more people need liver transplantation to save their lives. However, liver donation is always short to match the demand of liver transplantation. Therefore, how to expand the donor pool to increase the opportunities of liver transplantation is paramount. Splitting liver is one of the ways to expand the donor pool and offers an additional chance of liver transplantation. At the beginning of split liver transplantation (SLT), the liver was split and transplanted to an adult and a child. Now, the liver can be split into full right and left lobes and transplanted to two adults. When split liver transplantation is to be performed, there are many considerations that should be clarified. With the improvement of surgical skill, the outcomes of split liver transplantation are similar to that of deceased whole liver transplantation. It is worth to promote the policy of split liver transplantation.

Part of the book: Frontiers in Transplantology