lung cancer treatment, vats procedure surgery for lung diseases

 

What are the vats procedure operation?

The types of minimally invasive surgery we do for lung cancer (in the spectrum here for doing minimally invasive procedures for our biopsies), but we also remove parts of the lung with the scope. We call those either vats or minimally invasive lobectomies or lung cancer vats procedure operation. And it’s kind of a newer approach to them taking out parts of the lung, without actually having to make larger incisions into the chest. Now, the biggest advantages for doing the
operations in this matter is that: (1) we don’t have to open the chest, so there’s no cutting of the muscles on the outside part of the chest, nor do we have to cuddle or remove any parts of the ribs. Patients usually wind up with three or four small incisions that are a centimeter or two in size and this is one of the most important advantages of the lung vats procedure operations.

vats procedure pain control:

In general, there are pain controls that wind up being much much better. Hospital stays tend to be shorter and we’re able to get the patients back to a better functional recovery in a quicker fashion. This certainly allows us to extend the ability to operate on people who have more advanced emphysema or other lung diseases so that we’re able to take out a part of their lung without opening the chest by following the lung vats procedure technique, because they’re able to breathe better after the operation, they have less complications (such as pneumonia), and again are able to go home sooner and then usually they wind up getting back to a better functional recovery.

vats procedure for the advanced lung cancer patients:

Correct, the trend for patients who have more advanced stages of lung cancer in general is to receive a combination of chemo therapy and radiation as their initial treatment. Once they’ve completed that therapy and especially if they’ve had a good response, then we’re able to go in surgically and remove a part of the lung that has the tumor by the lung vats procedure surgery and also remove the lymph nodes, which is usually the situation in that case that sometimes can be done as a minimally invasive procedure (more often is done as a more standard open operation), just because of the need to remove all of the lung tissue and lymph nodes that are involved with the cancer, but more and more even those types of operations will be done in a minimally invasive approach. Nationwide, it’s estimated that only about 10 to maybe 15 percent of all lung cancer operations are done as a minimally invasive approach. Part of that is surgeons are comfortable with the minimal invasive procedures and the vats procedure techniques.

vats procedure as a treatment for lung diseases:

Some of it has to do with patient’s anatomy and the type of lung cancer, the stage that they have; so all that winds up factoring. I think as with the next generation cardio thoracic surgeons are trained, there will be a greater familiarity with doing minimally invasive operations and more successful vats procedure operations, especially in the chest. So I anticipate that as we wind up going forward, more and more of the lung cancer operations will be done as a vats procedure or minimally invasive procedure. There’s been at least data available for a number of years that doing the operations with a minimally invasive approach especially more of these are properly done with patients whose cancers are detected at an earlier stage that compared to what traditionally has been survival when we’re finding very small lung cancers and we wind up removing them with the scopes. There have been reports with as high as 90 to 95 percent of those patients being cured that from their lung cancer which is in comparison to 15 to 20 percent of all comers and we have to know that vats procedure surgeries plays an important role on that success.

So there clearly appears to be an advantage in terms of certainly small incisions, but (in terms of) survival from their cancers. I think that in comparison to what we’ve been dealing with over the years and patients with lung cancer and having a higher risk of dying from their disease; anything new that we could introduce that could improve survival, gets the patients home quicker and then also winds up getting them to their other therapies (whether it be chemo therapy or radiation)and now the new vats procedure surgery , in certainly encouraging terms of being able to increase survival from this disease.