Background: Treatment of gastric cancer is based on accurate staging. Emerging methods, such as PET-CT, are increasingly being used for this purpose. Our aim was to analyze the results of EUS and PET-CT in staging and restaging our patients with gastric cancer, comparing both of them with the histological results.
Methods: Patients with confirmed gastric cancer were prospectively enrolled. Inclusion criteria for the final analysis included only patients who finally received a surgical resection. All patients underwent preoperative TNM staging by means of EUS and PET-CT within 21 days prior to the surgical treatment.
Results: A total of 256 patients were included. The overall EUS accuracy for T staging was 78% and 80.2% in restaging. EUS showed its best accuracy when distinguishing T1-T2 tumors vs. T3-T4, with an increased accuracy in restaging. Regarding N staging, the overall accuracy of EUS was 76.2%, and 72.5% for PET-CT (p = 0.02). With regards to restaging, accuracy of EUS and PET-CT for N staging was 88.5% and 69%, respectively, with significant differences (p < 0.0001).
Conclusions: EUS performed better than PET-CT in gastric cancer N staging and restaging. EUS accuracy in this setting is still suboptimal and probably more than one single diagnostic procedure should be used.
Keywords: EUS; Gastric cancer staging; PET-CT; gastric preoperative evaluation; restaging.