Patients not eligible for resection because of their medical condition might be candidates for local ablative therapy, such as percutaneous ethanol injection (PEI) and PRFA. Many clinical trials comparing PRFA and PEI have demonstrated the clear superiority of PRFA over PEI [9, [15] [16] [17] . However, a major limitation of PRFA is the small volume of tumor that can be treated. The rate of complete ablative necrosis decreases with the size of the tumor, particularly in the case of tumors Figure 4 Cumulative overall survival rate between percutaneous radiofrequency thermal ablation (PRFA) group patients with liver cirrhosis (LC) (n = 127) and surgical resection (SR) group patients with liver cirrhosis (LC) (n = 50). The 1-, 3-and 5-year overall survival rates after PRFA and SR were 94.2%, 75.8% and 56.4%, respectively in the PRFA group with LC and 100%, 78.0% and 67.8%, respectively in the SR group with LC. There was no significant differences between these two groups as determined using the log-rank test (P = 0.521).