Types of Lung Surgery

But keyhole surgery means patients are fit enough to start it sooner. In Pat's case, we removed the upper lobe of her right lung. But with the left one, removing a whole lobe would mean taking away half that lung.

The less invasive techniques can mean less time in the hospital, though if needed surgeons can still resort to the more open type of surgery.

A lobectomy is a type of lung cancer surgery in which one lobe of a lung is removed. (The right lung has three lobes, and the left lung has two lobes.) A lobectomy is also occasionally performed for other conditions, such as tuberculosis, severe COPD, or trauma that interrupts major blood vessels near the lungs.

The choice for patients with lung cancer is usually a lobectomy, but in some patients with minimal lung reserve, lung segmentectomy may be an option. [2, 3] The essence of lung segmentectomy is to remove the lung disease without removing excess normal lung.

So we have found that if the tumor is only locally invasive to the central airway, you can cut that airway above and below where the mass is and sew the other parts of the lung back together and actually save the remainder of the lung and I probably do 20 or more of these a year, I’m one of the busier surgeons in the country that does sleeve resections, and they’re really, really useful.

We perform wedge resection to treat lung cancer, particularly non-small cell lung cancer. This form of treatment involves removing the cancerous cells in the lung, as well as removing a margin of surrounding healthy tissue. Wedge resection may be an alternative option to a lobectomy (removing the entire lung).