[Current status and perspectives of endoscopic surgery]

In these twenty years, an endoscopic surgery has been widely applied to the patients as the treatment of benign and malignant diseases in the various fields, such as digestive surgery, respiratory surgery, endocrine surgery, urological surgery, and gynecological surgery. It has been generally accepted that the endoscopic surgery is less invasive and more beneficial compared with the conventional surgery in retrospective multicenter studies. In near future, with rapid advances of instruments and techniques, the establishments of EBM by prospective clinical trials, further education and training systems, and technical overcome in NOTES, SPS, and robotics, would be needed to be more widely accepted for the endoscopic surgery as extremely less invasive therapy.