Introduction:
Liver cancer is one of the most common tumors in the world. Patients with liver cancer usually face substantial physical, psychological, and social burdens, which has a great demand and expectation to ease the burden in all aspects. This study aimed to develop and validate a scale evaluating treatment expectations for patients with liver cancer (TES-LC).

Material and methods:
The study was conducted in three phases. In the first stage, we used literature reviews and semi-structured interviews to generate the items to be included in the questionnaire TES-LC (version 1). In the second stage, two rounds of the Delphi expert consultation method were used to modify the first version to form TES-LC (version 2). In the third stage, projects were selected through project analysis and exploratory factor analysis to create TES-LC (version 3); version 3 was tested for reliability and validity to generate version 4.

Results:
The final version of the TES-LC contains 19 items in 5 dimensions: disease symptoms, practical needs, psychological state, emotional satisfaction, and social function. Five common factors were extracted through exploratory factor analysis, explaining 60.11% of the variance. In the validation factor analysis, the fitting effect of the five-factor model was satisfactory after modification. The TES-LC had good internal consistency, with a Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.911 for the total scale.

Conclusions:
The TES-LC developed in this study has good reliability and validity and can provide a standardized tool for measuring treatment expectancy in patients with liver cancer, which is of good clinical utility.