Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is common in the Far East and South Africa, but is rare in the United States and Europe. The vast experience of the East, which has led to marked improvement in the prognosis of patients with HCC, is made available to researchers worldwide in this monograph. The book is based on an enormous amount of data that has been collected and analyzed by the Liver Cancer Study Group of Japan. The data stems from a survey on HCC in Japan since 1965 and contains information from more than 30,000 patients with regard to age distribution, past medical history, diagnostic procedures, frequency of HBV-associated antigens and antibodies, surgical and conservative treatments, gross anatomical and histological features of the tumors, pathology of the noncancerous portions, distant metastasis, and survival rate. This data is a tremendous contribution to our understanding of the epidemiology, pathology, and the latest developments of the molecular biology and clinical problems of primary liver cancer.