Patients

Between January 1998 and June 2001 we had 45 patients with gastric cancer underwent exploratory laparotomy, from these 45 a total of 15 patients with invasive operable Gastric Carcinoma (Surgical stages T2N0M0/T3N0M0) underwent intraoperative lymphatic mapping with blue dye sentinel node biopsy and followed by D2 lymphadenectomy.

We exclude the patients with tumor T4, Macroscopic evidence of node invasion and previous gastric surgery.

The average age of patients was 51 years, the range of age 23-80 Adenocarcinoma was documented preoperatively in all cases by endoscopy and biopsy; abdominal CAT scan and USG performed Preoperative staging.

Methods

All the patients underwent laparotomy and Surgical staging to be shure that were candidates for the study, we used 5 ml of blue dye (Methylene blue) transmural peritumoral injection; started dissecting off the omentum from the transverse colon and then we looking for the sentinel node (10-15 minutes after the injection) then underwent a formal D2 lymph node dissection.

We did not use frozen sections of sentinel nodes. All the nodes, sentinel and nonsentinel nodes were processed for histology by serial sectioning and hematoxylin and eosin staining.