Laparoscopic assisted colectomy for colon cancer. The importance of the preoperative diagnosis for the depth of the cancer invasion

Laparoscopic colectomy (LAC) has become accepted for benign disease and ear ly colorectal cancer. However, there is a discussion about the application of LAC to advanced cases. Our indication of LAC has been mucosal or submuco sal cancer. We underwent LAC for 23 colon cancer cases from January 1997 to July 1999. For 15 cases out of these 23 cases we performed magnifying colo noscopy (MC) to diagnose the depth of cancer invasion (DCI) following LAG. Among these 15 cases, 4 cases, of which the preoperative DCI were submucosa l, showed different DCI by histological examination.. Two cases showed slig ht muscular invasion by histological examination. Another two cases demonst rated unusual invasion to the subserosal layer. We investigated these cases and concluded that MC was useful for the preoperative DCI for laparoscopic colectomy.