“…According to histological manifestation, EGC is divided into differentiated and undifferentiated type, the former covers papillary adenocarcinoma, well and moderately-differentiated tumor and the latter includes poorly-differentiated tumor and signet ring cell carcinoma (SRCC) (8). For total or differentiated EGC, various demographic and clinicopathological features were picked out as the risk factors of LNM from original research, meta-analysis or data of Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results program (SEER), such as patients' gender (6), age (9), tumor location (3,6), gross pattern (10), tumor size (10), ulcerative lesion (UL) (2), depth of invasion (11), histological differentiation (10), and lymphovascular invasion (LVI) (11). For pure undifferentiated EGC, gender, age, tumor location, tumor size, gross pattern, LVI, and depth of invasion were also identified as the risk factors of LNM in previous studies (12)(13)(14).…”