What's Changed With Lung Cancer Surgery?

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Dr. Raja Flores discusses how earlier detection has transformed lung cancer surgery. While minimally invasive techniques such as robotic and video-assisted surgery play a role, he explains that CT scans have made one of the biggest differences by helping doctors find smaller tumors. Detecting lung cancer earlier can allow surgeons to remove less lung tissue through smaller incisions, helping improve survival and preserve lung function.
Lung cancer surgery has changed over the past decades, but not as much as people think. Your body hasn't changed. The cancers now are smaller because in the old days, they used to just have x-ray, and x-ray missed a lot of tumors. Now we have CAT scan, which is finding tumors at a much smaller size. And that has changed the face of lung cancer. Everybody thinks it's minimally invasive surgery, vats, thoracoscopic, robotic. And that's my entire practice. I've been doing minimally invasive surgery since the year 2000. But that's not what changed lung cancer surgery. Lung cancer surgery has dramatically changed by finding these tumors earlier. You take out less lung, you make smaller incisions, they have a better cure rate, they have a better survival rate, and functionally, they do much better.
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