Professor Sung-Hoon Noh (Seoul, South Korea) moderated a special session “Quality Control of Surgery in Clinical Trials” at IGCC 2017. “The most important thing in clinical trials is quality assessment and quality control”, he told Daily News. There have been many clinical trials conducted in recent years in the field of gastric cancer, and especially for cancer surgery, a qualitative trial is very important. “Surgeons have different techniques and different concepts, even though everyone has a set code of conduct. Most lymph node dissection surgeries, for example, are quite different between the surgeons, so the standard of surgery is most important in conducting good clinical trials.”
When assessing quality control in surgical trials, the Professor went on to say that, “especially for surgical trials, there are some objective variables to be assessed. That means that the extent of lymph node resection, contamination and compliance of the lymph nodes, having a reasonable operation record by using photographs and video monitoring of the surgery are all important in making a quality assessment.”
Professor Sung-Hoon Noh was one of the primary investigators in a clinical trial about ten years ago. He recalls quality standards were maintained with onsite visits done by expert surgeons, and everyone who participated in the clinical trial was required to submit a photographic record after lymph node dissection.