Fig. 3

Study flow chart. The inclusion criteria are as follows: (1) preoperative pathology of endoscopic biopsy was gastric adenocarcinoma, (2) absence of distant metastasis, and (3) the American Society of Anesthesiology (ASA) physical status score ≤ 3. Exclusion criteria were as follows: (1) postoperative pathology was not primary gastric adenocarcinoma, (2) conversion to open gastrectomy, (3) clinical or pathological data was incomplete, and (4) lost to follow-up. PSM analysis was conducted using a logistic regression model with the following covariates: age, gender, ASA grade, BMI, tumor location, clinical stage, and preoperative histological type. We adopted a caliper width of 0.02 for the pooled standard deviation of the logit for calculating the propensity score for PSM