Endoscopic laser therapy in gastroenterology.

Endoscopic laser therapy has become an important and widely used tool in gastroenterology. It has become important for outpatient palliative therapy for ablating obstructing gastrointestinal neoplasms. This method has often circumvented the need for major palliative surgical resections. Caution must be applied to laser therapy for potentially curable malignant neoplasms because, with vaporization of the target tissue, no tissue specimen is available to assure that local or invasive residual carcinoma is excluded. Therefore, in good surgical candidates, surgical resection of potentially curable cancers is always recommended. In the future, however, the combination of refined endoscopic ultrasonography and laser fluorescence techniques may lead to earlier detection, more precise localization, and even curative ablation of gastrointestinal malignancy.