# RECICL (Japanese response criteria for liver cancer)

Source: https://onco.cc/terms/recicl/  
OnCo record `recicl` (Term). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

RECICL is the Liver Cancer Study Group of Japan's rulebook for judging how a liver cancer has responded to ablation, chemoembolisation or drugs, counting tumour death as well as size.

## Summary

The Liver Cancer Study Group of Japan wrote the Response Evaluation Criteria in Cancer of the Liver because WHO and RECIST criteria do not capture the direct effect of radiofrequency ablation or chemoembolisation. The 2009 revision (Kudo and colleagues, Hepatology Research 2010) split complete response after ablation by whether the ablative margin was enough, made a new liver lesion count as progression, and added three tumour markers (AFP, AFP-L3 and DCP). The 2015 revision set target lesions at two per organ or three in the liver, up to five, changed the timing of overall assessment and allowed extrahepatic disease to be assessed, similar to RECIST or mRECIST.

## Fields

- Kind: Term
- Last checked: 2026-11-04
- Also known as: RECICL; Response Evaluation Criteria in Cancer of the Liver

## Sources

- Kudo et al., Response Evaluation Criteria in Cancer of the Liver (RECICL) (2015 revised version) (Hepatol Res 2016): https://doi.org/10.1111/hepr.12542
- Kudo et al., RECICL proposed by the Liver Cancer Study Group of Japan (2009 revised version) (Hepatol Res 2010): https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1872-034x.2010.00674.x

## Connected records

- terms: [Complete response (CR) and partial response (PR)](https://onco.cc/terms/complete-response-term/), [EASL response criteria for liver cancer (2001)](https://onco.cc/terms/easl-criteria/), [mRECIST for liver cancer (modified RECIST)](https://onco.cc/terms/mrecist/)
- cancers: [Hepatocellular carcinoma](https://onco.cc/cancers/hcc/)

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