Laparoscopic Surgery for Digestive Cancers:
Digestive cancer means tumor present in one or many of the digestive organs in our gastro-intestinal tract.
Digestive organs include esophagus, stomach, liver, spleen, gall bladder, pancreas, small intestine, large intestine and rectum.
One of the biggest limitations of open surgery is that the surgeon has to make a big incision of 6-9 inches on abdomen even to access affected area and many a times realize once accessed that the disease is too widespread to operate and simply close the abdomen.
Diagnostic, Staging and Therapeutic Laparoscopy offers a great advantage in avoiding such morbid exploration in cases of stomach, colon and pancreatic cancers.
There are enough large randomized controlled trials (RCT) to prove that laparoscopic colonic resection is comparable to open surgery in terms of disease control and recurrence.
Even laparoscopic liver surgeries are done for cancer of liver in dedicated centers with excellent results.
With the advent of new technology, skills and experience the conversion to open surgery is considerably reduced.