Retrospective Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2019. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Sep 21, 2019; 25(35): 5334-5343
Published online Sep 21, 2019. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v25.i35.5334
Pathological response measured using virtual microscopic slides for gastric cancer patients who underwent neoadjuvant chemotherapy
Sadayuki Kawai, Tadakazu Shimoda, Takashi Nakajima, Masanori Terashima, Katsuhiro Omae, Nozomu Machida, Hirofumi Yasui
Sadayuki Kawai, Hirofumi Yasui, Division of Gastrointestinal Oncology, Shizuoka Cancer Center, Sunto-gun 411-8777, Shizuoka, Japan
Tadakazu Shimoda, Takashi Nakajima, Division of Pathology, Shizuoka Cancer Center, Sunto-gun 411-8777, Shizuoka, Japan
Masanori Terashima, Division of Gastric Surgery, Shizuoka Cancer Center, Nagaizumi 411-0932, Shizuoka, Japan
Katsuhiro Omae, Clinical Research Center, Shizuoka Cancer Center, Sunto-gun 411-8777, Shizuoka, Japan
Nozomu Machida, Department of Gastrointestinal Oncology, Shizuoka Cancer Center, Sunto-gun 411-8777, Shizuoka, Japan
Author contributions: All authors helped to perform the research: Kawai S manuscript writing, performing procedures, experiments, and data analysis; Shimoda T manuscript writing, drafting the conception and design of this work, and performing experiments; Nakajima T performing experiments; Terashima M contributing to writing the manuscript; Omae K data analysis and statistical review; Machida N and Yasui H contributing to writing the manuscript, and drafting the conception and design of this work.
Institutional review board statement: This study was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Committee of Shizuoka Cancer Center.
Informed consent statement: Patients were not required to give informed consent to the study because the analysis used anonymous clinical data that had been obtained after each patient had agreed to treatment by providing written informed consent.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All authors declare no conflicts of interest related to this article.
Data sharing statement: No additional data are available.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Sadayuki Kawai, MD, PhD, Doctor, Division of Gastrointestinal Oncology, Shizuoka Cancer Center, 1007 Shimonagakubo, Nagaizumi, Sunto-gun 411-8777, Shizuoka, Japan. sadayuki-kawai@i.shizuoka-pho.jp
Telephone: +81-55-9895222 Fax: +81-55-9895634
Received: May 8, 2019
Peer-review started: May 8, 2019
First decision: July 22, 2019
Revised: August 8, 2019
Accepted: August 19, 2019
Article in press: August 19, 2019
Published online: September 21, 2019
Core Tip

Core tips: Although pathological response is commonly evaluated to assess the efficacy of neoadjuvant chemotherapy for gastric cancer in clinical practice, the results evaluated by pathologists are sometimes discordant. A previous study suggested that pathological evaluation using digital virtual microscopic slides might be useful. However, the application of this approach to clinical practice was not investigated. We thus assessed the utility of this method in clinical practice and the concordance rate between evaluators, and compared the usefulness of this method with conventional histological evaluation using Japanese Classification of Gastric Carcinoma criteria.