Endoscopic ultrasonography in pancreatic carcinoma
Even though pancreatic cancer is not such a common diagnosis, its treatment is very expensive and it has a great economic impact to the health system. 5-year survival rates after excessive surgical treatment is only 5%, which imposes more careful selection of patients that have to be surgically treated. According to experience from some medical centers all over the world, EUS is considered as a high sensitive diagnostic method for establishing a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and evaluation of TNM staging. The main purpose of this survey is to present our experience in using of EUS as a diagnostic method in establishing a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, as well as to evaluate how reliable this method is in preoperative evaluation if tumor could be successfully resected. We examined the group of 63 patients with pancreatic cancer, which were surgically explored after EUS examination. We wanted to compare TNM status before and after the penetration ability of the probe working with the frequency of 7,5 MHz, EUS is not a suitable method for evaluation of M stage (figure 8,9). Patients were divided in different groups, specified by TNM status. For 10 patients resection was estimated as a probably successful solution, but only 8 of them was surgically treated. According to this, our estimation was 79,7% accurate, which is in accordance to results obtained from other medical centers all over the world.