Morbidity analysis in minimally invasive esophagectomy for oesophageal cancer versus conventional over the last 10 years, a single institution experience

BACKGROUND: There has been an increasing inclination towards minimally invasive esophagectomies (MIEs) at our institute recently for resectable oesophageal cancer. OBJECTIVES: The purpose of the present study is to report peri-operative and long-term procedure specific outcomes of the two groups and analyse their changing pattern at our institute. METHODS: All adult patients with a diagnosis of oesophageal cancer managed at our institute from 2005 to 2015 were included in this retrospective study. Patients’ demographic and clinical characteristics were recorded through our hospital information system. The cohort of esophagectomies was allocated into two groups, conventional open esophagectomy (OE) or total laparoscopic MIE; hybrid esophagectomies were taken as a separate group. The short-term outcome measures are an operative time in minutes, length of hospital and Intensive Care Unit (ICU) stay in days, post-operative complications and 30 days in-hospital mortality. Complications are graded according to the Clavien-Dindo classification system. Long-term outcomes are long-term procedure related complications over a minimum follow-up of 1 year. Trends were analysed by visually inspecting the graphic plots for mean number of events in each group each year. RESULTS: Our results showed no difference in mortality, length of hospital and ICU stays and incidence of major complications between three groups on uni- and multi-variate analysis (P > 0.05). The operative time was significantly longer in MIE group (odds ratio [OR]: 1.66, confidence interval [CI]: 2.4–11.5). The incidence of long-term complication was low for MIE (OR: 1.0, CI: 133–1.017). However, all post-operative surgical outcomes trended to improve in both groups over the course of this study and stayed better for MIE group except for the operative time. CONCLUSION: MIE has overall comparable surgical outcomes to its conventional counterpart. Furthermore, the peri-operative outcomes tend to improve in our centre with the maturation of program and experience.