The approach to patients with indeterminate pulmonary nodules is poorly defined. Should every pulmonary nodule be biopsied, is needle biopsy adequate, and other questions are challenges. Video assisted thoracic surgery or thoracoscopy has added a new diagnostic possibility which is evaluated in this paper. Fifty-five patients underwent thoracoscopy for diagnosis of a solitary pulmonary nodule. ...

objective : double aortic arch (daa) is a rare congenital malformation. strategies for diagnosis and treatment are different. thoracoscopic treatment of daa is limited to case reports or little case series. we report a description of our diagnostic and therapeutic approach and evaluate outcomes. methods: we reviewed charts of infants with double aortic arch who were hospitalized in our departme...

Pleural effusion in sarcoidosis is infrequent. The data on thoracoscopic observations of sarcoidosis pleurisy are limited. The present study describes three cases of sarcoid-related pleurisy diagnosed by medical thoracoscopy and discusses the thoracoscopic features of sarcoid pleuritis. The appearance of pleural nodules was completely different in the three cases, and the distribution of nodule...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW In managing pleural diseases, medical thoracoscopy is often performed as a diagnostic and/or therapeutic procedure, particularly in undiagnosed pleural effusions. Flexi-rigid pleuroscopes are now widely available as an alternative to conventional rigid thoracoscopes. There is an ongoing debate on which is the better instrument. This review analyses the current literature that ...

In the historical evolution of thoracoscopy, which was initiated exactly one century ago by Hans Christian Jacobaeus, two distinct periods can be identified: one between 1910 and 1955, characterised by its use for the lysis of pleural adhesions to obtain therapeutic pneumothorax in lung tuberculosis, and the subsequent period which has seen the development of diagnostic applications, principall...

The aim of this study was to investigate the feasibility and safety of thoracoscopic surgery in the treatment of lung cancer and its effect on serum D-dimer. A total of 218 patients with lung cancer treated in the Department of Thoracic Surgery of Ningbo No. 2 Hospital from January 1, 2013 to December 31, 2016, were retrospectively analyzed. Of the 218 patients, 120 patients underwent thoracoto...

Pleural effusion constitutes around 25% of the workload in respiratory clinics yet the elucidation of underlying pathology in pleural effusion remains a diagnostic challenge. The most feared diagnosis in pleural effusion of unknown origin is malignancy, where the probability of a definitive diagnosis from aspiration, even in the most experienced hands, is approximately 60%.1 The dilemma, theref...