Ricerc@Sapienza

We read with great interest the comment letter by
Winter et al. on our recently published study on the
new concept of intention-to-treat (ITT) survival benefit
of liver transplantation (LT) in patients with hepatocellular
cancer (HCC).(1)Winter et al. reported some comments
mainly focused on the methodological approach
used for constructing the mathematical model.
We draw attention to the supplementary section of
our article in which we explain our approach.
We did not mean to imply that the construction of
our benefit model was innovative. Nor did we ignore
the seminal works of Merion and Schaubel, which we
referred to in our article. Rather, the innovation of our
work is connected with its ITT design.