Minimally invasive surgery for early stage lung cancers: satisfactory, but we can do better

Since the first major pulmonary resections using closed chest surgery, reported 25 years ago (1), the attitude of the surgical and oncology community has changed substantially. Not so long ago, an editorial stated the following sentence: We can no longer ignore the accumulating evidence of these recent reports that suggest VATS lobectomy is inferior oncologically to open lobectomy for clinical stage I lung cancer (2).