Gastric cancer preoperative staging is of outmost importance to assure proper management of the disease. Providing a relevant clinical stage relies on different imaging methods such as computed tomography (CT) or endoscopic ultrasound (EUS). We aimed to perform a network meta-analysis for gastric cancer clinical stage diagnostic tests, thus comparing the diagnostic accuracy of EUS vs. multidetector CT (MDCT) and EUS vs. EUS + MDCT. We plotted study estimates of pooled sensitivity and specificity on forest plots and summary receiver operating characteristic space to explore between-study variation in the performance of EUS, MDCT and EUS + MDCT for T1-T4, N0-N3, M0-M1 when data were available. Exploratory analyses were undertaken in RevMan 5. We included twelve studies with 2047 patients. Our results suggest that EUS was superior to MDCT in preoperative T1 and N staging. MDCT is more specific for the M stage but no significant difference in sensitivity was obtained. When comparing EUS vs. EUS + MDCT for T1 both sensitivity and specificity were not relevant. No significant differences were observed in T2-T4 stages. Even though EUS helped differentiate between the presence of invaded nodules, N stages should be carefully assessed by both methods since there is not sufficient data.
Keywords: computed tomography; endoscopic ultrasound; gastric cancer staging.