For staging the status of lymph node metastasis in gastric cancer, typographic based staging system was applied until last decade, especially in Eastern countries. However the old typographic lymph node staging system in gastric cancer was too complicated and less accurate for predicting the prognosis. Now the numeric based lymph node staging system is used in both East and West, but it include problems: no information on the anatomical extent of the disease, preoperative lymph node staging is nearly impossible, failure to provide an appropriate treatment plan, cannot represent the extent of lymph node dissection. We designed simple and specifically representing the anatomic extent of the disease for staging the status of lymph node in gastric cancer. Thus we compared its prognostic performance of this new staging system with those of the current TNM 7th edition of AJCC/UICC.

Inclusion Criteria:

• patients were pathologically confirmed as primary gastric cancer
• patients underwent gastrectomy with curative intent.

Exclusion Criteria:

• Patients underwent minimally invasive surgery
• patients with any distant metastases including peritoneal seeding and para-aortic LNs metastasis)
• when the location of lymph nodes were not divided
• patients underwent chemotherapy preoperatively
• patients had metastatic lymph nodes with unclear location

patients who underwent gastrectomy with lymph node dissection for gastric cancer in Yonsei University Hospital, Seoul