Clinical aspects of second-look laparotomy in ovarian cancer

Second-look laparotomy was performed in 56 patients with ovarian cancer, who presented no clinical evidence of disease after completion of a treatment program with chemotherapy. At the second-look laparotomy 31 of the patients were found to have residual disease, and 25 patients had no residual tumour. During the second-look operations we found it difficult to evaluate macroscopically whether there was any residual disease. 21% of the patients were estimated as false negative and 6% as false positive. This stresses the importance of taking multiple biopsies in the absence of clearly visible residual disease confirmed by frozen sections.