Midterm outcomes of single port thoracoscopic surgery for major pulmonary resection.

Single-port thoracoscopic surgery has widened the current minimally invasive surgical techniques toward more less invasive procedures in terms of reducing the number of incisions. However, the current status of oncologic outcome with this technique is not well known for lung cancer surgery. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the oncologic outcomes in early stage lung cancer for impact of the survival outcomes with our experience of conversion to a single-port approach from the conventional three-port approach.Retrospective data of patients who underwent thoracoscopic major lung resection for non-small cell lung cancer between January 2006 and June 2015 were analyzed. Patients' characteristics, perioperative outcomes, pathologic result, and postoperative follow-up data of thoracoscopic surgery were reviewed and surgical outcomes were compared between conventional three-port (n = 168), two-port (n = 68), and single-port thoracoscopic surgery (n = 203).Of the 203 single-port thoracoscopic surgeries, we performed 167 single-port thoracoscopic lobectomy and mediastinal lymph node dissections. During the learning period of each thoracoscopic approach, the mean operation time for single-port thoracoscopic surgery (189±62 min) was not significantly different from those of two-port (175±46 min) and three-port (195±75 min) thoracoscopic lobectomy (p = 0.165). Perioperative outcomes including drain indwelling time (p