[Minimally Invasive Open Surgery for Lung Cancer]

Significant efforts have been made to reduce the invasiveness of surgical procedures by surgeons for a long time. Surgeons always keep it in mind that the basic principle performing less invasive surgical procedures for malignant tumors is to decrease the invasiveness for patients without compromising oncological curability and surgical safety. Video-assisted thoracic surgery (VATS) has been used increasingly as a minimally invasive approach to lung cancer surgery. Whereas, whether VATS lobectomy is a less invasive procedure and has equivalent or better clinical effect compared with open lobectomy for patients with lung cancer remains controversial because of the absence of randomized prospective studies. The degree of difficulty for anatomical lung resection depends on the degree of the fissure development, mobility of hilar lymph nodes, and the degree of pleural adhesions. During pulmonary surgery, thoracic surgeons always have to deal with not only these difficulties but other unexpected events such as intraoperative bleeding. Recently, we perform pulmonary resection for lung cancer with minimally invasive open surgery (MIOS) approach. In this article, we introduce the surgical procedure of MIOS and demonstrate short-term results. Off course, the efficacy of MIOS needs to be further evaluated with long-term results.