Omental infarction (OI) following laparoscopy-assisted gastrectomy (LAG) for gastric cancer could become more common in the future because the indications for LAG are expected to expand. The aim of this study was to determine the clinical characteristics of OI following LAG.

Three hundred ninety patients who underwent LAG for T1 or T2 gastric cancer from April 2003 to November 2007 were enrolled. OI was diagnosed by two radiologists using the patients' abdominal 16 row-detector CT scans. The clinicopathologic characteristics were retrospectively evaluated in the omental infarction (OI) group and the non-omental infarction (non-OI) group using the gastric cancer database of Dong-A University Medical Center and the medical records.

Nine omental infarctions (2.3%) of 390 LAGs were diagnosed. All the OIs could be discriminated from omental metastasis on the initial or follow up CT images. The location of the omental infarctions was on the epigastrium in 3 patients and in the left upper quadrant in 3 patients. The mean size of the OIs was 4.1 cm. Most patients with OI had no signs or symptoms. The body mass index of the OI group was higher than that of the non-OI group (P=0230), and OI was more common in patients who underwent total gastrectomy than in the patients who underwent subtotal gastrectomy (P=0.0011).

Laparoscopy-assisted gastrectomy (LAG) with partial omentectomy for gastric cancer can be a cause of secondary OI. Omental infarction after LAG has different clinical characteristics and CT findings that those of other omental infarctions or postoperative omental metastases. Further multicenter study will be needed to evaluate in detail the clinical features of omental infarction after LAG.