procedures, HIPEC, staging, laparoscopy WORLD JOURNAL OF SURGICAL ONCOLOGY

Full list of author information is available at the end of the articleBackground Peritoneal carcinomatosis (PC) represents an advanced stage of many cancers and is associated with poor survival rates [1-5]. Cytoreductive surgery (CRS) with hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC) was introduced in an attempt to improve the prognosis of these patients and incorporates surgical removal of all visible disease followed by chemical destruction of microscopic disease through chemoperfusion [6]. The most validated predictors of outcome in patients undergoing CRS +HIPEC are preoperative tumor bur-den measured in terms of the peritoneal carcinomatosis index (PCI) and completeness of cytoreduction (CC) [7-10]. Patients undergoing CRS + HIPEC in which sur-gery achieved complete or near complete cytoreduction (CC-0 or CCR-1) were shown to have significantly greater survival benefit over those who did not [7,9,11]. Survival analyses studies have shown that patients with PCI scores less than 19 (colorectal) and 10 (gastric) benefit most from CRS +HIPEC, facilitating the use of these scores as general cut-offs for excluding patient