Published online May 24, 2025. doi: 10.5306/wjco.v16.i5.105881
Revised: March 13, 2025
Accepted: April 8, 2025
Published online: May 24, 2025
Processing time: 100 Days and 12.1 Hours
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is among the most aggressive primary liver cancers, leading to significant global mortality. While early diagnosis improves prognosis, treatment decisions, particularly between surgical resection and radiofrequency ablation (RFA), remain controversial.
To clarify this issue using sentiment analysis of medical literature alongside a meta-analysis of overall survival (OS).
We included studies comparing liver resection and RFA, excluding case reports, editorials, and studies without relevant outcomes. A systematic search in PubMed and Web of Science identified 197 studies. Abstracts underwent sentiment analysis using Python’s Natural Language Toolkit library, categorizing them as favoring resection, ablation, or neutral. We also performed a meta-analysis using a random-effects model on 11 studies reporting hazard ratios (HRs) for OS.
Sentiment analysis revealed that 75.1% of abstracts were neutral, 14.2% favored resection, and 10.7% favored RFA. The meta-analysis showed a significant survival advantage for liver resection, with a pooled HR of 0.5924 (95% confidence interval: 0.540-0.649). Heterogeneity was moderate (I² = 39.98%). Despite the meta-analysis demonstrating clear survival benefits of liver resection, most abstracts maintained a neutral stance. This discrepancy highlights potential biases or hesitancy in drawing definitive conclusions.
The study emphasizes the need for clinicians to prioritize robust statistical evidence over narrative impressions. Liver resection remains the preferred treatment for HCC in eligible patients.
Core Tip: With the exponential growth of medical literature, critically evaluating content is becoming increasingly complex. Reading abstracts is often the first step in selecting articles, influencing the decision-making process of clinicians and researchers. However, this study demonstrates how such an approach can lead to misleading interpretations of actual clinical outcomes, highlighting the need for a more in-depth analysis to avoid erroneous or distorted conclusions.