Prognostic Evaluation of Platelet-based Indices Using Clustering Based on Monte Carlo Comparisons for HCC

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide, and the burden of this devastating cancer is expected to increase further in coming years (Nguyen et al., 2009; Venook et al., 2010). In Asian region, the incidence of HCC exceeds 30 cases per 100, 000 residents annually, which is due to the high prevalence of chronic viral hepatitis, mainly chronic hepatitis B (Teo et al., 2002; Gao et al., 2012; Guo et al., 2012). Although many factors such as tumor size, number of tumor, vascular invasion and resection margin status are associated with the prognosis of HCC resection, it is necessary to find a potential prognostic cluster that is available before surgery, because it can be used to predict and assess the prognostic status for HCC patients who received tumor resection. In addition, the preoprative platelet count and serum aspartate aminotransferase