NBI for Identifying Resection Margin Status in Gastric Cancer

As the proportion of early gastric cancer has been steadily increased in Korea, so has function-preserving surgery. The function preserving surgery is characterized by the minimized extent of gastrectomy, so this implies that bilateral margins are getting shorter than those of standard gastrectomies.

Currently, there is only one way to identify resection margin status in gastric cancer, 'frozen biopsy'. However, it is labor-intensive and time-consuming procedure. In addition, the results rely on the pathologist's expertise, thereby it showed limitation of its accuracy; high false negative rate of signet ring cell carcinoma was reported in a previous study.

Recently, many studies on magnifying endoscopy with narrow band imaging(NBI) demonstrated that this emerging technique is useful to identify the gastric tumor margin more clearly in vivo, compared with conventional indigocarmine chromoendoscopy. So it was hypothesized that NBI may allow reliable delineation of tumor and identification of resection margin status in the specimen after gastrectomy for gastric cancer.