Kanazawa Akishige, Tsukamoto Tadashi, Shimizu Sadatoshi, Yamamoto Satoshi, Murata Akihiro, Kubo Shoji
Department of Hepato-Biliary-Pancreatic Surgery, Osaka City General Hospital, Miyakojima-ku, Osaka, Japan.
Dig Dis. 2015 Sep;33(5):691-8. doi: 10.1159/000438499. Epub 2015 Sep 23.
This chapter covers a range of important topics of laparoscopic hepatectomy as a novel approach toward treatment of liver cancer. Although laparoscopic hepatectomy was performed in a limited number of centers in the 1990s, technological innovations, improvements in surgical techniques and accumulation of experience by surgeons have led to more rapid progress in laparoscopic hepatectomy in the late 2000s for minimally invasive hepatic surgery. Currently, laparoscopic hepatectomy can be performed for all tumor locations and several diseases via several approaches. The laparoscopic approach can be applied to several types of resection, not only for tumors but also for liver transplantation, with equivalent or better results compared with those obtained with open surgery. Therefore, laparoscopic hepatectomy will become a standard procedure for treatment of liver cancer in the near future.
