Evaluating the Diagnostic Accuracy of Endosonography for Gastric Cancer Staging in a Tertiary Center; A Cross-sectional Study

Introduction: The staging of gastric cancer has an important role in the management of tumors. Surgeons & oncologists may use many diagnostic tests to measure the stage of tumors. There is a need of study about the reliability of diagnostic endosonography as one of the most important tests for evaluating tumoral stages. The aim of current study is to determine the efficacy of endosonography (EUS) for the staging of gastric tumors pre-operatively. Methods: This cross-sectional study was performed on 120 patients with gastric cancer who underwent gastrectomy operation and admitted to a tertiary hospital between 2014 and 2015. At the beginning, the tumors were staged by using endosonography. Also, the tumors re-staged after surgery by histopathologic studies. The results of the two methods were compared. Diagnostic indicators such as sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, positive predictive value and negative predictive value were compared between the two methods and the level of 0.05 was considered as statistically significant. Results: Mean age of the patients was 65.44±12.3 years. Of the total patients, 87 patients (72.5%) were male and 33 (25.5%) were female. The accuracy of endosonography method was 82.5% for tumor size. Also, the accuracy of evaluating lymph node involvement by endosonography was 79.2% and for metastasis was 25.0%. Conclusion: Endosonography is a precise method for evaluating tumoral invasion and lymph node involvement with a high accuracy in our hospital and is recommended to be used forpre-operative staging of gastric cancers.