While surgeries for treating esophageal cancer used to leave two large incision scars or several small scars on the patient, now doctors are able to leave only about three to four small scars on the patient, with a single-incision minimally invasive surgery first performed at National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH), the hospital said.
Esophageal cancer is among the 10 most common types of cancer in the nation, where causes of death are led by cancer, the hospital said, adding that surgery is used as the main treatment for long-term survival .
As the surgery involves rebuilding a new esophagus after removing parts of the esophagus and some of the cancerous tissue, the incisions might span from the neck to the chest and abdomen, it said, adding that traditional open surgery usually requires two large incisions.
The more advanced endoscopic surgery can reduce the amount of incisions to about eight small holes on the chest and abdomen, but some patients might need more than 10 small incisions for the surgery to be completed, head of NTUH’s Department of Thoracic Surgery Lee Chang-ming (李章銘) said.
The hospital said its surgical teams had made progress with the use of flexible endoscopes and began performing single-incision minimally invasive surgery on esophageal cancer patients.
The surgery can be accomplished with one small incision on the chest and one on the abdomen, with at most three to four small incisions, it said.
When the first minimally invasive surgery was successfully performed at the hospital in 2014, the institution became the first in the world to achieve that result.
In the past three years, they have performed more than 60 surgeries, Lee said.
The patients experience less pain after the surgery with this method, he said.
The hospital said clinical results of the single-incision surgery for treating esophageal cancer have been published in medical journals, but patients still need to consult with their doctors to assess if the surgery is appropriate for treating their condition.
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