Abstract:
Objective:To explore the accuracy of endoscopic ultrasonography (EUS) for evaluating T3 esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC).
Methods:The retrospective crosssectional study was conducted. The clinicopathological data of 733 patients diagnosed with T3 ESCC by preoperative EUS who were admitted to the Sun Yatsen University Cancer Center from January 2003 to December 2015 were collected. All the patients underwent radical resection of ESCC. The postoperative pathological stage as a gold standard, the accuracy, overstaged and understaged rates of clinical staging by preoperative EUS were assessed. Observation indicators: (1) comparison between clinical T staging evaluated by preoperative EUS and postoperative pathological T staging; (2) followup and survival situations. Followup using outpatient examination and telephone interview was performed to detect patients′ diseases and postoperative survival up to December 30, 2016. Overall survival time was from operation time to death or last effective followup. Measurement data with normal distribution were represented as

±s. Measurement data with skewed distribution were described as M (range). Count data were represented as cases and percentage. The survival curve was drawn by the KaplanMeier method, and survival analysis was done using the Logrank test.
Results:(1) Comparison between clinical T staging evaluated by preoperative EUS and postoperative pathological T staging: all the 733 patients were confirmed as T3 ESCC by preoperative EUS. Postoperative pathological diagnosis showed that 9 patients were detected in pT1b, 87 in pT2, 630 in pT3 and 7 in pT4a. The accuracy, overstaged and understaged rates of preoperative EUS in evaluating T3 ESCC were 85.95%(630/733), 13.10%(96/733) and 0.95%(7/733), respectively. N0, N1, N2 and N3 of postoperative pathological N stage were respectively detected in 329, 247, 110 and 47 patients. Twentyseven, 323 and 383 patients were in stageⅠ, Ⅱ and Ⅲ of TNM stage, respectively. The high, moderate and lowdifferentiated tumors were respectively detected in 125, 403 and 205 patients. (2) Followup and survival situations: among 733 patients, 639 were followed up for 1.0-153.0 months, with a median time of 29.0 months. The median survival time, 1, 3, 5year overall survival rates were 53.0 months (range, 37.7-68.3 months), 85.3%, 58.1% and 48.2% in 733 patients, respectively. The 5year overall survival rate was 75.2% in 9 patients with pT1b, 63.0% in 87 patients with pT2, 46.3% in 630 patients with pT3 and 0 in 7 patients with pT4a, respectively, with a statistically significant difference (x
2=24.089, P<0.05).
Conclusion:There is a higher accuracy of EUS for evaluating T3 ESCC, however, the stage migration should be noted.