All the liver diseases by different causes, such as virus hepatitis, medicine-related hepatitis, alcoholic hepatitis, toxic hepatitis, metabolic liver disease, and tumor can evolve into liver dysfunction with various degree. When the function can not meet the essential need of the human physiology, the presents of liver failure will appear, such as liver coma. At this moment, most of the hepatic cells are the in status of degeneration, even necrosis which results in severe metabolic disorders and the accumulation of toxic metabolites. Since the traditional etiological, symptomatic and supportive treatment usually could not take effect at this time, the mortality is dramatically high.
Liver transplantation can bring the second chance of life to these suffering patients, but lots of these patients go away before the arrival of the proper donor liver. For the benefit of these patients, the scientists thought of an artificial equipment that can temporarily function as a substitution of the native liver, thus, it can be taken as the transition treatment before liver transplantation. These kinds of ex vivo equipment that is made by modern technology, and can substitute the native liver are called artificial liver. The working process of the so called artificial liver, in short words, is that the filtration of the patients' circulation blood, by which the toxic metabolites are removed and at the same time the essential matter to maintain the function of the body is synthesized ex vivo and transfused into the body blood circulation. Thus, the artificial liver functions as the adjuvant liver or the complete substitution of the native liver until the liver transplantation. We performed several cases of artificial liver treatment for advanced liver disease before liver transplantation, and accumulated abundant experience. The artificial liver can not only help the advanced patients to survive the pre-transplantation waiting time, but also can improve the result of transplantation. With the help of artificial liver, lots of severe liver failure patients, and even severe liver coma patients can liver through liver transplantation. But, it should be clarified that the artificial liver can not completely substitute the native liver, and it can only be taken as the transitional treatment before transplantation. No reports of successive long-term patients survival available till now only on the support of artificial liver.