Minimally invasive surgery for liver resection still remains controversial.
The present study was designed to compare open versus laparoscopic liver resection
(LLR).
Between January 2012 and December 2013, LLR was performed on 30 patients at our
institution. We performed partial hepatectomy through a pure laparoscopic method and
anatomical hepatectomy by a laparoscopy-assisted method. We performed a
retrospective review of these patients.
The study comprised 25 men and 5 women with a mean age of 70.5 years. All patients
had a liver function of Child-Turcott-Pugh classification A. The mean diameter of the
tumors was 20.8 mm. Thirteen cases were resected by the pure method and 17 cases
underwent the hybrid method. Nineteen patients underwent partial hepatectomy, 8
patients underwent subsegmentectomy, and 3 patients underwent segmentectomy.
Mean intra-operative bleeding was 403.7 ml, and mean operating time was 316.4 min.
No patients developed severe postoperative complications. We compared 19
laparoscopic partial hepatectomies (LLR-P) with 9 open partial hepatectomies.
Although, no significant differences were observed in perioperative factors, both length
of hospital stay and the frequency of analgesic administration were significantly reduced in LLR-P. Furthermore, we compared 13 laparoscopic (sub) segmentectomies
(LLR-S) with 11 open cases. The operation time of LLR-S were longer than those of
open cases, whereas no significant differences were detected in blood loss in these
procedures. All length of hospital stay favored the LLR-S group.
In these series comparing laparoscopic and open liver resections, there were no severe
complications observed in the LLR group and there was significant rapid recovery in
the LLR group, even for resections involving (sub) segmentectomy by the hybrid
method.
Keywords: Hepatectomy, Laparoscopic liver resection, Laparoscopyassisted
liver resection, Minimally invasive surgery.
