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SUMERA ILYAS: The advantage of referring a patient to Mayo or for a patient to come here would be if an ultrasound hasn't been adequate. Just because a patient had an ultrasound, it didn't show anything, doesn't necessarily mean that they don't have liver cancer, because the quality of the ultrasound matters a great deal. So let's say the patient has obesity, and even an ultrasound here would not be adequate, then we could do other tests to look for liver cancer. And those would be a CT scan with IV contrast or an MRI with IV contrast.

90% of primary liver cancers or hepatocellular carcinomas occur in patients who have cirrhosis of the liver. So if a patient is diagnosed with cirrhosis and they have liver cancer screening at the time of diagnosis, and then every six months thereafter, that improves the chances of catching cancer at an earlier stage. And that matters a great deal because the treatment options that are offered for liver cancer depend upon the stage of the disease. So the potentially curative treatment options are available only for earlier stages of disease.

I think one of the unique aspects of getting liver cancer care at the Mayo Clinic is our multidisciplinary team. So we have a very large team with different specialists, and we come together once a week at our Multidisciplinary Hepatobiliary Tumor Board to review our liver cancer cases. Our teams work closely together. So if we were to see a patient we thought that they needed to see a surgeon that same day, it's very easy at Mayo, given our camaraderie and collegiality, to be able to pick up the phone and say, do you mind seeing this patient today? And that's really essential in being able to provide prompt and expeditious care for our patients.

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