This study presents a retrospective analysis of a prospectively collected database of upper- or middle-third GC patients treated with laparoscopic spleen-preserving SHLND in the Department of Gastric Surgery of Fujian Medical University Union Hospital, Fuzhou, China, between January 2011 and December 2014. The following inclusion criteria were used: (1) histologically confirmed primary adenocarcinoma in the upper- or middle-third stomach; (2) no evidence of tumor invasion in adjacent organs (pancreas, spleen, liver, or transverse colon), enlargement or integration of the para-aortic or splenic hilar LNs, or distant metastasis demonstrated by preoperative abdominal computed tomography (CT), abdominal ultrasound or endoscopic ultrasound; and (3) a total gastrectomy plus D2 lymphadenectomy with curative R0 resection based on the postoperative pathological diagnosis. The exclusion criteria were patients with T4b tumors; incomplete clinicopathological data; intraoperative evidence of peritoneal dissemination or distant metastasis; or gastric stump carcinoma. A total of 398 patients, including 302 males and 96 females with a mean age of 60.76 ± 10.58 years, were included in the present study. The preoperative size, location, T stage (with or without the presence of serosal invasion) and N stage (with or without LN metastasis) of the neoplasm were assessed in all patients via upper digestive endoscopy with biopsy, chest X-ray, total abdominal ultrasound, and abdominopelvic CT scan. Preoperative comorbidities were described according to the classification system of the American Society of Anesthesiologists . CT scans and multi-slice spiral CT angiography were performed to preoperatively assess the splenic vascular anatomy. BLV(mL) of splenic LNs was estimated according to the number of the gauze blocks and the trip attraction of aspirator, A piece of “two by two” is equivalent to 4 ml.The patient demographics, underlying diseases, clinicopathology, and preoperative and postoperative monitoring data were recorded in a clinical data system for GC surgery. The type of surgical resection and extent of LN dissection were selected according to the Japanese gastric cancer treatment guidelines . The resected specimens were histopathologically examined and staged according to the 7th edition of the UICC TNM classification . According to the reported references [9–11], data were randomly divided into two subsets using SPSS version 18.0 (SPSS, Chicago, IL, USA) to create a 75/25 split, with one subset used for model development and the other used for validation testing.