Laparoscopic gastrotomy in intragastric surgery for early gastric cancer: a new technique

Laparoscopic surgery has been widely applied not only in cholecystectomy but also in gastrointestinal operations. In previous reports the authors proposed their original operative technique, laparoscopic intragastric surgery (LIGS),' in which all trocars and surgical instruments are inserted directly into the gastric lumen to perform the resection of mucosal or' submucosal lesions of the stomach. The purpose of this article is to introduce laparoscopic gastrotomy as a new technique for removing early gastric cancer by LIGS.