SNUBH’s surgery team for gastrointestinal tract (three professors including Kim Hyung-ho, Park Do-jung and An Sang-hun) has undergone 5,262 laparoscopic surgeries for gastric cancer until December, 2014 since it had the first operation in May, 2003.
Those five thousand operation cases show the best performance in terms of operation cases and results. In particular, it boats of safety in laparoscopic surgery for gastric cancer as it has the most cases of single incision laparoscopic surgery. The analysis on 5,262 laparoscopic surgeries for gastric cancer shows that the death rate is only 0.02 percent, and its odds of developing complications (23.5%) are less than those of laparotomy (14.2%).
Laparoscopic surgery for gastric cancer has been increasingly recognized with patients’ recuperative powers, decrease in pain and minimizing the surgical scars as well as its efficacy in improving the quality of life among patients, which led by SNUBH’s surgery team for gastrointestinal tract.
SNUBH is also undergoing various laparoscopic surgeries for gastric cancer based on clinical tests to the extent which it operates 90 percent of gastric cancer surgeries via laparoscopic operation. It also has operational experiences with top-notch surgical skills such as stomach preserving gastrectomy through gastrointestinal tract, laparoscopic surgery for advanced stomach cancer, proximal gastrectomy and single incision gastrectomy.
The advance of gastric cancer surgery can be attributed to cooperation across the medical departments including surgery, diagnosis and test,” said Kim Hyung-ho, Chief surgeon of SNUBH, “Korea’s single incision laparoscopic surgery for gastric cancer is gaining much attention from abroad like the U.S., Japan and Russia. In light of this, we are planning to develop new surgical areas to minimize the pain and complication of patients and make patients recover as soon as possible.”
By Lee Jae-seung