[Gastric cancer]

With the development of related instruments and techniques, laparoscopic surgery has come to be applied to treatment of gastrointestinal malignancies as a minimally invasive surgery. For early gastric cancers with negligible risk of lymph node metastasis, endoscopic mucosal resection (EMR), laparoscopic wedge resection (LWR), and laparoscopic intragastric mucosal resection (IGMR) have been performed. For those with fairly sizable risk of lymph node metastasis, laparoscopy-assisted distal gastrectomy (LADG) is applied. Our studies have suggest that LADG is more useful than open distal gastrectomy in the management of patients with gastric cancer from the viewpoints of curability, minimal invasiveness, and quality of life of patients.