Abstract:
Objective: Preoperative clinical staging is the key for selecting the ideal therapy for esophageal cancer. Mini-probe endoscopic ultrasonography (MCUS), an accurate diagnostic technique for T and N staging of esophageal can-cer, is used commonly in other countries but seldom in China. This study aimed to investigate the role of Multi-slice Comput-er Tomography (MSCT) with MCUS in the preoperative assessment of patients with esophageal cancer in order to deter-mine their value in surgical decision making. Methods:A total of 158 patients with esophageal cancer were prospectively en-rolled into the study. Participants were randomly assigned into group A ( n=79) or group B ( n=79) and then received a preop-erative X-Ray barium meal and gastroscope. They also had MSCT examination or MCUS according to their group. The outcome of preoperative staging and predictive surgery programs with postoperative pathologic staging and final surgery programs were compared between group A and group B. Result:There were152 patients available for analysis. There was no statistical difference in the baseline characteristics between group A (n=75) and group B ( n=77). The accuracy of preop -erative T staging, N staging and surgical procedure prediction in group A were 60.00% ,77.33% and 73.33% . The corre-sponding rates in group B were 84.41% ,83.12% and 89.61% . In T staging and surgical procedure prediction, significant statistical differences were observed between the two groups with P=0.001 and P=0.010 , respectively. However the analy -sis showed no significant differences in N staging between the two groups ( P=0.370 ). The relationship between multiple clinicopathologic factors and surgical procedures was analyzed. Conclusion: Group B has higher accuracy in preoperative staging for esophageal cancer and provides better evidence to make surgery decisions than group A. We suggest that mini-probe endoscopic ultrasonography become a routine medical examination in more hospitals.