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Updated: Dec 20, 2025

Subcostal Specimen Removal in Completely Portal Robotic Lobectomy
Published on: April 19, 2024
Comparison of sublobar resection and lobectomy for patients with small (≤2cm) second primary non-small-cell lung
Donglai Chen1, Xuejie Wu2, Junmiao Wen3,4
1Department of Thoracic Surgery, Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital, Tongji University, School of Medicine, Shanghai, China.
Background:
This study aimed to investigate whether sublobar resection (SR) is equivalent to lobectomy for small (≤ 2 cm) second primary lung cancer (SPLC).
Methods:
We identified 834 patients with T1aN0M0 SPLC from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database during 2000-2016. Overall survival (OS) was compared between lobectomy and SR after propensity-score matching. A total of 228 patients with SPLC were identified from three institutions in China as the validation set.
Results:
SR was an independent risk factor for patients with 1 to 2 cm SPLC (SR vs Lob: hazard ratio [HR], 1.593; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.186-2.141; P = .002) but not for patients with SPLC ≤ 1 cm (SR vs Lob: HR, 1.206; 95% CI, 0.790-1.841; P = .385). Subgroup analysis on the SEER data indicated that OS favored lobectomy compared with SR for contralateral SPLC ≤ 2 cm but not for ipsilateral ones (ipsilateral: P = .692; contralateral: P = .030). Our multi-institutional data also revealed that SR was equivalent to lobectomy for patients with ≤2 cm ipsilateral SPLC.
Conclusions:
SR is equivalent to lobectomy for SPLC ≤ 1 cm but not for SPLC > 1 to 2 cm. SR might be recommended for patients with ipsilateral small SPLC considering the difficulty in reoperations.

