Abhishek Biswas, Malay Kumar Barman, Manoj Kumar Singh, Narayan Pandit
BACKGROUND Carcinoma of Stomach is the fourth most common malignancy. Before planning an operation, correct staging of the disease is important. Contrast Enhanced Computerized Tomography (CECT) is considered to be important for this purpose. Much controversies exist as to the value of CECT in the preoperative staging of carcinoma of stomach. The objective of the present study was to compare the efficiency of CECT with the operative findings in cases of carcinoma of stomach. MATERIALS AND METHODS This study included 64 patients, 42 males and 22 females in the age group 30 to 70 year. All the patients had carcinoma stomach diagnosed by upper GI endoscopy and biopsy and preoperatively staged by CECT. All these patients underwent laparotomy and surgically assessed as to invasion of pancreas and transverse colon by the primary tumour and secondaries in liver. In doubtful cases, tissue samples were harvested for pathological confirmation. RESULTS In detecting invasion of pancreas, CECT was found to be 40.9% sensitive; 85% specific. In detecting colonic invasion, CECT was 64% sensitive and 100% specific. For detection of secondaries in the liver, CECT was 54% sensitive and 92% specific. CONCLUSION Thus, this study proved that CECT is not a good investigation to detect invasion of pancreas and transverse colon by the carcinoma of stomach but CECT is a dependable investigation to detect secondaries in the liver from carcinoma of the stomach.
