Recent advances in nonsurgical treatment of pulmonary ground-glass nodules

Since the 1990s, low-dose computed tomography technology has been used in lung cancer screening. With the increase of computed tomography screening, the detection rate of ground-glass nodules (GGN) has increased dramatically. At present, the main treatment strategy for GGN is surgical resection. However, for patients with poor cardiopulmonary functions, a history of lung resection, multiple pulmonary nodules, or the age of >75 years, surgical resection is very difficult and not medically encouraged. This article reviews the applications and outcomes evaluation of nonsurgical treatments, such as chemotherapy, radiotherapy, moleculartargeted drug therapy, immunity therapy, and image-guided thermal ablation in patients with GGN.