FISH was then performed on TMAs containing 257 HCC samples to elucidate telomere lengths in paired peritumor and intratumor areas. We calculated eight cell types separately along with H&E staining for each patient, i.e. tumor cells, peritumor liver cells, CAFs, non‐tumoral fibroblasts (NTFs), TILs, peritumor‐infiltrating lymphocytes (PTILs), peritumor bile duct epithelial cells (P‐BDECs), and tumor bile duct epithelial cells (T‐BDECs) (supplementary material, Figure S1C, D). Figure 2D shows representative images of telomere signals in tumor cells and CAFs at single‐cell resolution. Consistent with telomere shortening in other solid tumors 10, 11, 25, telomere signals were less intense (i.e. shorter telomere length) in tumor cells than in adjacent liver cells (p < 0.001; Figure 3A). In total, 164 out of 257 samples (63.81%) displayed significantly less intense telomere signals among tumor cells compared with corresponding normal liver cells (supplementary material, Figure S2A).