Introduction: Several factors are included in decision making for treatment of patients with locally advanced rectal cancer, including a trade-off between risks and gains of both clinical and functional outcomes. However, it is largely unknown which outcomes are most important to patients and whether this differs between patients and clinicians. Methods: Both clinicians and patients treated for locally advanced rectal cancer were invited to fill out an online questionnaire, including a choice-based conjoint experiment. Participants were presented 14 comparisons of two hypothetical case presentations, characterized by different treatments and outcomes of care (6 attributes) and were asked to select the case with the best outcome at that moment. Hierarchical Bayes Estimation was used to calculate the relative importance (RI) of each of the six attributes. Results: In total, 94 patients and 128 clinicians completed the questionnaire. For patients, avoiding surgery with permanent stoma was most important (RI 24.4, 95%CI 21.88–26.87) and a 2-year difference in disease-free survival was least important (RI 5.6, 95%CI 4.9–6.2). Clinicians assigned highest importance to avoiding severe and daily worries about cancer recurrence (RI 30.7, 95%CI 29.1–32.4), while this was ranked 4th by patients (RI 17.9, 95%CI 16.5–19.4, p < 0.001). Conclusion: When confronted with different outcomes within one case description, patients find the duration of disease free survival the least important. In addition, considerable differences were found between the importance assigned by patients and clinicians to clinical and functional outcomes, most notably in avoiding surgery with permanent stoma and worries about recurrence.@en

Background and Objectives: In patients with rectal cancer who received neoadjuvant (chemo)radiotherapy, fibrosis is induced in and around the tumor area. As tumors and fibrosis have similar visual and tactile feedback, they are hard to distinguish during surgery. To prevent positive resection margins during surgery and spare healthy tissue, it would be of great benefit to have a real-time tissue classification technology that can be used in vivo. Study Design/Materials and Methods: In this study diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS) was evaluated for real-time tissue classification of tumor and fibrosis. DRS spectra of fibrosis and tumor were obtained on excised rectal specimens. After normalization using the area under the curve, a support vector machine was trained using a 10-fold cross-validation. Results: Using spectra of pure tumor tissue and pure fibrosis tissue, we obtained a mean accuracy of 0.88. This decreased to a mean accuracy of 0.61 when tumor measurements were used in which a layer of healthy tissue, mainly fibrosis, was present between the tumor and the measurement surface. Conclusion: It is possible to distinguish pure fibrosis from pure tumor. However, when the measurements on tumor also involve fibrotic tissue, the classification accuracy decreases. Lasers Surg. Med.

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Neoadjuvant radiotherapy, as part of the conventional treatment of rectal cancer, can induce fibrotic tissue formation around the tumor. This complicates the exact determination of the tumor borders during surgery, which might increase the chance of positive resection margins. In a previous ex vivo study, we distinguished tumor tissue from healthy rectal wall and fat with an accuracy of 0.95, using diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS). Since this study did not include fibrosis, the aim of the current ex vivo study was to examine whether differentiation of tumor and fibrosis with DRS is possible. DRS measurements from freshly resected specimen of 16 patients were obtained. In eight patients fibrosis was measured, in the other eight patients tumor was measured. The measurements were performed using a DRS probe with a source-detector distance of 2 mm. The spectra were obtained in the wavelength range of 450-1600 nm. Classification of the measurements was done using a support vector machine (SVM) and a set of features extracted from the spectra. The SVM was evaluated using an eight-fold cross-validation, which was repeated ten times. For all repetitions, the area under the ROC curve was greater than 0.85 (mean = 0.87, STD = 0.02). The mean sensitivity and specificity were 0.85 (STD = 0.03) and 0.88 (STD = 0.01) respectively. It can be concluded that tumor tissue can be distinguished from fibrosis based on spectral features from DRS measurements. The next step will be to conduct an in vivo study, to verify these results during surgery.@en

Background: In colorectal cancer surgery there is a delicate balance between complete removal of the tumor and sparing as much healthy tissue as possible. Especially in rectal cancer, intraoperative tissue recognition could be of great benefit in preventing positive resection margins and sparing as much healthy tissue as possible. To better guide the surgeon, we evaluated the accuracy of diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS) for tissue characterization during colorectal cancer surgery and determined the added value of DRS when compared to clinical judgement. Methods: DRS spectra were obtained from fat, healthy colorectal wall and tumor tissue during colorectal cancer surgery and results were compared to histopathology examination of the measurement locations. All spectra were first normalized at 800 nm, thereafter two support vector machines (SVM) were trained using a tenfold cross-validation. With the first SVM fat was separated from healthy colorectal wall and tumor tissue, the second SVM distinguished healthy colorectal wall from tumor tissue. Results: Patients were included based on preoperative imaging, indicating advanced local stage colorectal cancer. Based on the measurement results of 32 patients, the classification resulted in a mean accuracy for fat, healthy colorectal wall and tumor of 0.92, 0.89 and 0.95 respectively. If the classification threshold was adjusted such that no false negatives were allowed, the percentage of false positive measurement locations by DRS was 25% compared to 69% by clinical judgement. Conclusion: This study shows the potential of DRS for the use of tissue classification during colorectal cancer surgery. Especially the low false positive rate obtained for a false negative rate of zero shows the added value for the surgeons. Trail registration This trail was performed under approval from the internal review board committee (Dutch Trail Register NTR5315), registered on 04/13/2015, https://www.trialregister.nl/trial/5175.

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Objectives Hospital variation in risk-adjusted outcomes after colorectal cancer surgery has been shown. However, explanatory factors are not sufficiently clear. The objective of this study was to identify factors perceived by gastrointestinal surgeons as important to achieve excellent casemix-adjusted outcomes after colorectal cancer surgery. Design Based on literature and experts' opinion, 86 factors associated with serious complications, failure to rescue and mortality were listed. These were presented to gastrointestinal surgeons through two web-based surveys and an expert meeting. Participants were asked to choose their top 10 of most important factors. Participants Dutch gastrointestinal surgeons (n=52) of different hospitals and different hospital types (general/teaching/academic). Results Of 31 invited experts for the first survey and meeting, 71% responded. Of 130 invited surgeons, 34 responded to the second survey. Factors deemed important were: procedural hospital volume (46% in top 10), specialised surgeons performing surgery, (elective 87%, emergency 60% and reoperations 62% in top 10), accessibility of, and daily ward rounds by specialised surgeons (41% and 38% in top 10), preoperative screening for malnutrition (57% in top 10), a protocol for recognition of anastomotic leakage and rapid reintervention (54% and 49% in top 10). Conclusion Procedural hospital volume, specialisation of surgeons, screening for malnutrition, early recognition of complications followed by rapid action were perceived as most important factors to achieve good outcomes by gastrointestinal surgeons.@en

Colorectal surgery is the standard treatment for patients with colorectal cancer. To overcome two of the main challenges, the circumferential resection margin and postoperative complications, real-time tissue assessment could be of great benefit during surgery. In this ex vivo study, diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS) was used to differentiate tumor tissue from healthy surrounding tissues in patients with colorectal neoplasia. DRS spectra were obtained from tumor tissue, healthy colon, or rectal wall and fat tissue, for every patient. Data were randomly divided into training (80%) and test (20%) sets. After spectral band selection, the spectra were classified using a quadratic classifier and a linear support vector machine. Of the 38 included patients, 36 had colorectal cancer and 2 had an adenoma. When the classifiers were applied to the test set, colorectal cancer could be discriminated from healthy tissue with an overall accuracy of 0.95 (±0.03). This study demonstrates the possibility to separate colorectal cancer from healthy surrounding tissue by applying DRS. High classification accuracies were obtained both in homogeneous and inhomogeneous tissues. This is a fundamental step toward the development of a tool for real-time in vivo tissue assessment during colorectal surgery.

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