Proposal of modified textbook outcome for improving the quality of gastric cancer surgery: A single-center study.

270 Background: Gastric cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Since 2014, the national healthcare quality assessment has been implemented for gastric cancer in Korea, which has the highest incidence. The proportion of early gastric cancer through early detection is high in Korea, and gastric cancer surgery has a great influence on outcome index. The aim of this study is to find indicators that can improve Textbook outcome (TO) in patients undergoing gastric cancer surgery. Comparing with Western data, we intended to propose a modified TO (mTO). Methods: Using a prospective clinical database, we included consecutive cases of gastrectomy for primary gastric cancer between 2014 and 2016. TO was achieved when 10 original indicators proposed by the DUCA group were satisfied. We propose to adjust the index of the number of retrieved lymph nodes from 15 to 30 as the modified TO(mTO) indicator for improving the quality of gastrectomy. For comparison with Western data, we calculated TO, mTO and survival in stage I versus Stage II and III. Results: A total of 2,153 patients were included. TO was achieved in 80.1 percents by 10 original indicators. Most of the indicators showed more than 90 percents of TO satisfaction. Five-year survival was significantly different between the TO (90.0%) and non-TO (76.1%) groups ( P < 0.001). For 608 patients in stage II and III, TO was 72.9 percents, which was much higher than the Western publications. Five-year survival were 74.8 percents for the TO group and 56.8 percents for the non-TO group in stage II and III patients. We found that the number of metastatic lymph nodes increases as the stage increases and even the number of metastatic lymph nodes in stage IIIC exceeded 19. The modified textbook outcome (mTO) for stage II and III was 65.3 percents, and five–year survival was significantly different between mTO (74.0%) and mnon-TO (62.1%) groups ( P < 0.001). To prevent R1 resection and minimize the proportion of remnant total gastrectomy, we performed frozen study examinations of the proximal and distal margins as to ensure high oncological safety. Conclusions: Data from a high volume gastric cancer center showed the high textbook outcome rates. It suggests that the minimum number of lymph node retrievals should be at least 30, even in advanced gastric cancer, and routine intraoperative frozen study examination are necessary to increase R0 resection.