Laparoscopic Intra-gastric Surgery for Early Gastric Cancer: A New Technique in Laparoscopic Surgery

A new laparoscopic operation for the treatment of mucosal or submucosal gastric lesions has been designed and performed on 12 patients. In this procedure, all three trocars are placed in the gastric cavity, penetrating both the abdominal and gastric walls in order to perform a laparoscopic removal of gastric lesions. The operation is then carried out in the gastric cavity using currently available laparoscopic instruments and laparoscopic monitoring. The procedure is easy, safe and feasible for mucosal or submucosal lesion of the stomach that cannot be treated by gastrofiberscopic technique. In this series, we treated a total of 12 patients: 10 patients with early gastric cancer, 1 with a submucosal leiomyoma and 1 with giant polyps of the stomach - all of which were treated uneventfully. Since this technique is based on a new concept in laparoscopic surgery, the author has named this operation "Laparoscopic Intra-gastric Surgery" (L.I.G.S.).