Surgical Management of Benign Gastric Tumors: A Review

Benign stomach and duodenal tumors are uncommon. Any component of the stomach epithelium, whether glandular, endocrine, or mesenchymal, can develop benign neoplastic tumors. The majority of people with benign stomach and duodenal tumors are asymptomatic for a long time. When symptoms do appear, they are determined by the tumor's size, location, and comorbidities. Endoscopy, computed tomography, and especially endoscopic ultrasonography results are used diagnose. Clinically, it's difficult to tell the difference between benign and malignant stomach tumors. Even benign tumors can undergo malignant transformation, severe obstructive problems, and bleeding. As a result, aggressive surgical resection of the tumors should be undertaken. Laparoscopic resection has become the first option of many surgeons since the development of minimally invasive surgery. According to previous literature, laparoscopic excision of GIST is safe and effective. In this review we’ll be looking at benign gastric tumors, gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs) and their diagnosis.

Current Status of Photodynamic Diagnosis for Gastric Tumors

Although the recent development and widespread use of image-enhanced endoscopy and magnifying endoscopy have improved endoscopic diagnosis of gastric cancer, it is somewhat complicated, requires a higher level of expertise, and is still subjective. Photodynamic endoscopic diagnosis (PDED) is based on the fluorescence of photosensitizers that accumulate in tumors, which enables objective evaluation independent of the endoscopist’s experience, and is useful for tumor detection. The objective of this work was to perform a narrative review of PDED for gastric tumors and to introduce our approach to PDED in gastric tumors in our hospital. In our review there have been case reports of PDED for gastric cancer, but its usefulness has not been established because no prospective studies evaluating its usefulness have been performed. In our previous study, 85.7% (42/49) of gastric tumors exhibited fluorescence in PDED. PDED may be useful in the diagnosis of early gastric cancer. Our previous studies were pilot studies in cancer patients; therefore, future prospective studies are required to verify the usefulness of PDED.

GIST of the stomach masquerading as recurrent falls in an older adult: a case report and review

Background Gastric tumors become increasingly prevalent with advanced age but can be challenging to diagnose in older adults who may present with non-specific symptoms. Here, we report a rare case of an occult gastric tumor associated with mesenteric panniculitis that presented with recurrent falls precipitated by vertigo. Case presentation We describe a diagnostically challenging case of cryptogenic gastric tumor associated with mesenteric panniculitis in a 74-year-old female who presented with abdominal bloating and recurrent falls precipitated by vertigo, dehydration, acute kidney injury and electrolyte deficiencies, but had no alarm symptoms. Her symptoms resolved after laparoscopic wedge resection of the gastric tumor. Conclusions Our case highlights that while alarm symptoms such as dysphagia, weight loss, gastrointestinal bleeding and vomiting are considered indications for endoscopy, clinicians should also maintain a high index of suspicion for gastric tumors in older patients who may present with atypical symptoms.

Clinical Effect Analysis of Laparoscopic Surgery for Gastric Tumor under Data Mining

This paper mainly analyzes the feasibility of laparoscopic local gastrectomy for the treatment of benign gastric tumors, evaluating its curative effect, and the use of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) such as Hedyotis diffusa, Radix Pseudostellariae, yi, Pinellia ternata, Ophiopogon japonicus, wood fragrance, Perilla, Scutellaria baicalensis, Yuzhu, hawthorn, Artemisia annua, chicken yellow film, nail, and turtle, and clinical symptoms of statistical analysis of data mining. A total of 86 patients with gastric benign tumor were selected as the research object and were divided into observation group and control group with 43 cases in each by the random number table method. The control group received radical gastrectomy for benign tumor under laparoscopy, while the observation group received local gastrectomy under laparoscopy. Perioperative indexes such as operative time, intraoperative blood loss, and length of hospital stay were recorded in the two groups. Serum C-reactive protein (CRP) and carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) levels were analyzed by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), and the incidence of complications was compared. Based on the clinical analysis of the drug used, the results of association significance were selected, and the top ten results were selected in order of confidence and grouped according to clinical symptoms, respectively, as follows: (1) abdominal distension: Hedyotis diffusa, Radix Pseudostellariae, Poria cocos, Huckleberry, and Coix seed; (2) dry mouth: Poria cocos, Radix Radix Pseudostellariae, Coix seed, Pinellia tuber, and Radix Ophiopogonis. The results showed that the minimum operation time in the observation group was 159.7 ± 13.07 min and the maximum was 172.57 ± 2.47 min, which was lower than that in the control group (the minimum was 172.46 ± 12.45 min and the maximum was 186.49 ± 24.32 min). The length of hospital stay (6.51 ± 1.29 days) was lower than that in the control group (7.56 ± 1.42 days) (P < 0.05). The CEA and CRP levels decreased significantly in both groups after treatment ( P < 0.05 ). However, the observation group’s CEA was (4.21 ± 1.05) mg/L and CRP was (8.46 ± 1.25) μg/L. In the control group, CEA was (4.18 ± 1.02) mg/L and CRP was (8.39 ± 1.24) μg/L. There were no significant differences ( P < 0.05 ). The incidence of complications in the observed group was 4.7% lower than 7.0% in the control group ( P < 0.05 ). Therefore, laparoscopic local gastric resection for benign gastric tumors can effectively reduce the incidence of CEA and CRP level and complications and improve the perioperative indicators, which is worth popularizing in clinical practice.

Targeting Tumor Cells with Nanoparticles for Enhanced Co-Drug Delivery in Cancer Treatment

Gastric cancer (GC) is a fatal malignant tumor, and effective therapies to attenuate its progression are lacking. Nanoparticle (NP)-based solutions may enable the design of novel treatments to eliminate GC. Refined, receptor-targetable NPs can selectively target cancer cells and improve the cellular uptake of drugs. To overcome the current limitations and enhance the therapeutic effects, epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) and low-concentration doxorubicin (DX) were encapsulated in fucoidan and d-alpha-tocopherylpoly (ethylene glycol) succinate-conjugated hyaluronic acid-based NPs for targeting P-selectin-and cluster of differentiation (CD)44-expressing gastric tumors. The EGCG/DX-loaded NPs bound to GC cells and released bioactive combination drugs, demonstrating better anti-cancer effects than the EGCG/DX combination solution. In vivo assays in an orthotopic gastric tumor mouse model showed that the EGCG/DX-loaded NPs significantly increased the activity of gastric tumors without inducing organ injury. Overall, our EGCG/DX-NP system exerted a beneficial effect on GC treatment and may facilitate the development of nanomedicine-based combination chemotherapy against GC in the future.

A rare MSH2 variant as a candidate marker for Lynch Syndrome II screening in Tunisia: A case of Diffuse Gastric Carcinoma

BACKGROUND Inherited syndromic forms of digestive cancers with age occurrence before 50 seem to be relatively in higher proportions in Tunisia suggesting genetic susceptibility. Several syndromic forms are known to predispose to early onset gastric tumors such as Hereditary Diffuse Gastric Cancer (HDGC) and Lynch Syndrome (LS). LS II is an extracolonic cancer syndrome characterized by a tumor spectrum including gastric cancer (GC). In the current work, our main aim was to identify the mutational spectrum underlying the genetic predisposition to diffuse gastric tumors occurring in a Tunisian family suspected with both HDGC and LS II syndromes. PATIENTS AND METHODS The index case was a woman diagnosed with Diffuse Gastric Carcinoma (DGC) fulfilling the international guidelines for both HDGC and LSII syndromes. Genomic DNA was used for the search of CDH1 and CTNNA1 germ mutations. We performed, also a DNA repair custom panel targeting candidate genes recovering the four DNA repair systems. Structural bioinformatics analysis was conducted to predict the effect of the revealed mutations. RESULTS No deleterious variants have been identified neither in CDH1 nor in CTNNA1 coding and their flanking regions. DNA repair genes panel screening identified two variants: a rare MSH2 c.728G > A classified as a variant with uncertain significance and a novel FANCD2 variant c.1879G > T. The structural prediction model of MSH2 mutation and electrostatic potential calculation showed for the first time that MSH2 c.728G > A is likely pathogenic and is involved in the MSH2-MLH1 complex stability. This mutation appears to affect the MSH2-MLH1 complex as well as DNA-complex stability. The c.1879G > T FANCD2 variant was predicted to destabilize the protein structure. CONCLUSIONS Our results showed that MSH2 p.R243Q variant is likely pathogenic and is involved in the MSH2-MLH1 complex stability with a putative impact on the binding with MLH1 by disrupting the electrostatic potential suggesting the revision of its status from VUS to likely pathogenic. This variant seems to be a shared variant in Mediterranean region. These findings emphasize the importance of testing DNA repair genes for patients diagnosed with DGC with suspicion of LSII as well as colorectal cancer allowing better clinical surveillance for more personalized medicine.

3D IFPN: Improved Feature Pyramid Network for Automatic Segmentation of Gastric Tumor

Automatic segmentation of gastric tumor not only provides image-guided clinical diagnosis but also assists radiologists to read images and improve the diagnostic accuracy. However, due to the inhomogeneous intensity distribution of gastric tumors in CT scans, the ambiguous/missing boundaries, and the highly variable shapes of gastric tumors, it is quite challenging to develop an automatic solution. This study designs a novel 3D improved feature pyramidal network (3D IFPN) to automatically segment gastric tumors in computed tomography (CT) images. To meet the challenges of this extremely difficult task, the proposed 3D IFPN makes full use of the complementary information within the low and high layers of deep convolutional neural networks, which is equipped with three types of feature enhancement modules: 3D adaptive spatial feature fusion (ASFF) module, single-level feature refinement (SLFR) module, and multi-level feature refinement (MLFR) module. The 3D ASFF module adaptively suppresses the feature inconsistency in different levels and hence obtains the multi-level features with high feature invariance. Then, the SLFR module combines the adaptive features and previous multi-level features at each level to generate the multi-level refined features by skip connection and attention mechanism. The MLFR module adaptively recalibrates the channel-wise and spatial-wise responses by adding the attention operation, which improves the prediction capability of the network. Furthermore, a stage-wise deep supervision (SDS) mechanism and a hybrid loss function are also embedded to enhance the feature learning ability of the network. CT volumes dataset collected in three Chinese medical centers was used to evaluate the segmentation performance of the proposed 3D IFPN model. Experimental results indicate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation networks in gastric tumor segmentation. Moreover, to explore the generalization for other segmentation tasks, we also extend the proposed network to liver tumor segmentation in CT images of the MICCAI 2017 Liver Tumor Segmentation Challenge.