Neoplastic disease confined to the liver is an important worldwide problem. In the industrialized nations, metastatic disease of the most common cancers involves the liver in upwards of 50% of cases. Primary hepatic tumors are virtually epidemic in most third world countries and certainly constitute one of the ten most common causes of cancer deaths on a worldwide scale. Amazingly, little specific attention has been devoted to therapeutic approaches of liver and biliary tumors until recently. We attribute this apparent lack of interest to the uniformly poor progno- sis of patients so...