Liver metastases from lung cancer

With the improvement of techniques in liver surgery, indications to hepatic resections have been extended in the last decades to liver metastases secondary to non-colorectal, non-neuroendocrine tumors. Here we describe the results about the outcome of patients who underwent liver resection for metastases from lung cancer. Metastatic lung cancer has a poor prognosis when associated to diffuse disease. However when liver oligometastases are detected after the resection of primary tumor and no extrahepatic disease is present, the prognosis can improve if the metastases can be completely removed. In such cases a specialized hepatobiliary center, which can assess the resectability of the tumor, should evaluate the patients. The cases reported in the last decade had a more favorable outcome, which can be explained by the combination of better diagnostic imaging, a better understanding of the disease biology, and progresses in hepatobiliary surgery.