Strategies for laparoscopic diagnosis of malignancy

Accurate cancer diagnosis and staging are crucial to the determination of an efficacious treatment plan for localized and advanced malignancy. The physician must differentiate patients with potentially resectable, localized disease from those with advanced and/or distant disease. The diagnostic and staging modalities currently available are expensive and often inaccurate. This can result in the nonoperative management of potentially resectable malignancies or, more commonly, in an underestimation of the preoperative cancer stage with intraoperative evidence of advanced/metastatic disease. The combination of laparoscopy and laparoscopic ultrasonography can be used to help diagnose and stage malignancies and select patients for either curative or palliative procedures.