Safety and outcome of three-dimensional transoral videolaryngoscopic surgery

BACKGROUND

Transoral videolaryngoscopic surgery (TOVS) is widely used in Japan, and conventional two-dimensional (2D) endoscopic methods have been established. Three-dimensional (3D) endoscopic surgery offers superior distance perception because it provides stereoscopic views. Recently, we have developed 3D endoscopy for TOVS (3D TOVS).

METHODS

This study included 46 patients with pharyngeal cancer who underwent 3D TOVS. The perioperative complications and survival curves were retrospectively analyzed.

RESULTS

One patient with oropharyngeal cancer who underwent neck dissection and transoral resection simultaneously experienced postoperative hemorrhage of the neck. Another patient with oropharyngeal cancer underwent hemostasis for postoperative pharyngeal hemorrhage. There was one case of aspiration pneumonia. One patient developed cervical lymph node recurrence; however, there was no local recurrence or primary mortality. The 2-year overall survival, disease-specific survival, local control rates, locoregional control rate, and invasive disease-free survival were 90.9%, 100%, 100%, 97.4%, and 79.9%, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS

Three-dimensional endoscopy can be safely applied to TOVS.

Transoral surgery for laryngo-pharyngeal cancer - The paradigm shift of the head and cancer treatment

Transoral surgery is a less invasive treatment that is becoming a major strategy in the treatment of laryngo-pharyngeal cancer. It is a minimally invasive approach that has no skin incision and limits the extent of tissue dissection, disruption of speech and swallowing muscles, blood loss, damage to major neurovascular structures, and injury to normal tissue. Transoral approaches to the laryngo-pharynx, except for early glottis cancer, had been limited traditionally to tumors that can be observed directly and manipulated with standard instrumentation and lighting. Since the 1990s, transoral laser microsurgery (TLM) has been used as an organ preservation strategy with good oncological control and good functional results, although it has not been widely used because of its technical difficulty. Recently, transoral robotic surgery (TORS) is becoming popular as a new treatment modality for laryngo-pharyngeal cancer, and surgical robots are used widely in the world since United States FDA approval in 2009. In spite of the global spread of TORS, it has not been approved by the Japan FDA, which has led to the development of other low-cost transoral surgical techniques in Japan. Transoral videolaryngoscopic surgery (TOVS) was developed as a new transoral surgery system for laryngo-pharyngeal lesions to address the problems of TLM. In TOVS, a rigid endoscope is used to visualize the surgical field instead of a microscope and the advantages of TOVS include the wide operative field and working space achieved using the distending laryngoscope and videolaryngoscope. Also, with the spread of narrow band imaging (NBI), endoscopic mucosal resection (EMR) and endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD), which are widely used for superficial cancers in the gastrointestinal tract, have been applied for the superficial laryngo-pharyngeal cancer. Both EMR and ESD are performed mainly by gastroenterologists with a sharp dissector and magnifying endoscopy (ME)-NBI with minimal surgical margin. Endoscopic laryngo-pharyngeal surgery (ELPS) was developed to treat laryngo-pharyngeal superficial cancer by modifying the ESD procedure. The concept of ELPS is the same as that of ESD, however, the resection procedure is performed by a head and neck surgeon with both hands using a ME-NBI and rigid curved laryngo-pharyngoscope. These four procedures are low cost with similar oncological and functional outcomes to TORS. TORS may be less expensive than chemoradiotherapy, but the number of hospitals that can afford da Vinci surgical systems is limited. Even in the era of robotic surgery, these four procedures will be good options for laryngo-pharyngeal cancer.

The predictive role of infiltrative growth pattern in early pharyngeal cancers

CONCLUSION

The infiltrative growth pattern may predict tumor depth and lymph node metastasis. INF-a seems to fall into a low-risk category, and no additional treatment may be required immediately.

OBJECTIVES

Tumor depth is a predictor of lymph node metastasis in early pharyngeal cancers. An infiltrative growth pattern is also a prognostic factor in other cancers. This study aimed to elucidate the predictive role of infiltrative growth pattern in early pharyngeal cancers.

METHODS

Thirty-eight lesions from 37 patients who had undergone trans-oral resection of pharyngeal cancers were included. According to the Japanese Classification of Esophageal Cancer, infiltrative growth pattern was classified into three groups; INF-a, INF-b, and INF-c. The correlation between infiltrative growth pattern and tumor depth, cervical lymph node metastasis was analyzed.

RESULTS

Of the 38 lesions, 25 were INF-a, nine were INF-b, and four were INF-c lesions. Lymph node metastasis was observed in three INF-b and one INF-c lesions. In contrast, no INF-a had lymph node metastasis. All INF-a lesions showed shallow invasion of the sub-epithelium; INF-b and INF-c lesions had significantly greater depth than INF-a.