[The Role of Video-assisted Thoracic Surgery in Multimodality Therapy]

Minimally invasive surgery is being widely performed for the management of lung cancers owing to rapid technological advances in surgical devices and techniques. In recent times, because chemotherapy and radiotherapy have both become less invasive treatment strategies, therapeutic opportunities for the use of multimodality therapy have been increasing. Minimally invasive surgery is an important component that requires additional improvements to derive the complete benefit of multimodality therapy. We have been actively performing video-assisted thoracic surgery(VATS) for the management of advanced lung cancers, as well as early lung cancers to reduce surgical stress in our patients, thereby enhancing the scope of multimodality therapy. Although some reports have demonstrated the efficacy of VATS for the management of early lung cancers, only a limited number of reports have discussed the advantage of VATS for the management of advanced lung cancers. In this report, we reviewed patients with advanced lung cancer (pathological stageⅡ or Ⅲ) in whom complete resection was performed between January 2011 and December 2016, and we examined the role of VATS as a component of multimodality therapy.