Tracheobronchial injuries (TBI) are a heterogenous group of sometimes life-threatening traumas with different management approaches. Symptoms are mediastinal and subcutaneous emphysema, bloody secretions from the airway or haemoptysis in alert patients, and high air leakage along the cuff or increased ventilatory resistance may be signs for TBI in intubated patients. The necessity of immediate clinical evaluation, CT-scan and bronchoscopic evaluation are essential for prompt diagnosis and classification as well as experienced air way management and treatment, these patients are best managed from interdisciplinary teams including thoracic surgeons. While iatrogenic tracheal membrane laceration from intubation can be treated by lesion bridging with ventilation tube, stent application, open operative repair or endoluminal repair, intraoperative accidental cuts should be repaired by direct suture or with vital tissue coverage in case of local ischemia. The management of blunt or penetrating injury is sequential and needs immediate establishment and maintenance of a secure patent airway to provide adequate oxygenation. The next step is the treatment of life-threatening collateral injuries like major hemorrhage, cranial trauma or major organ damage arranged in the trauma team. The treatment of penetrating injuries to the airway need operative exploration in almost every case with minimal local dissection and debridement followed by direct repair. Muscle flap coverage is useful in case of combined esophageal injury. Damage of the tracheobronchial tree after blunt trauma must be repaired by direct suture or local tissue sparing resection and anastomosis. These lesions can be missed in the initial phase and may become prominent with scar tissue formation, stenosis and atelectasis in the later phases.

Lymph node (LN) removal during pulmonary metastasectomy is a prerequisite to achieve complete resection or at least collect prognostic information, but is not yet generally accepted. On average, the rate of unexpected lymph node involvement (LNI) is less than 10% in sarcoma, 20% in colorectal cancer (CRC) and 30% in renal cell carcinoma (RCC) when radical LN dissection is performed. LNI is a negative prognostic factor and presence of preoperative mediastinal disease usually leads to exclusion of the patient from metastasis surgery. Nonetheless, some authors found excellent prognoses even with mediastinal LNI in colorectal and RCC metastases when radical LN dissection was performed (median survival of 37 and 36 months, respectively). Multiple metastases, central location of the lesion followed by anatomical resections are associated with a higher LNI rate. The real prognostic influence of systematic LN dissection remains unclear. Two positive effects were described after radical lymphadenectomy: a trend for improved survival in RCC patients and a reduction of mediastinal recurrences from 23% to 0% in CRC patients. Unfortunately, there is a great number of studies that do not demonstrate any positive effect of lymphadenectomy during pulmonary metastasectomy except a pseudo stage migration effect. Future studies should not only focus on survival, but also on local and LN recurrence.

Background/Objectives: Patients with single metastases from colorectal cancer constitute a subgroup with an excellent 5-year OS of 55–70% and with a real chance for cure. In this situation, local margin recurrence in the lung may impair the prognosis and thus is the main outcome target of surgery. Methods: A retrospective multicenter analysis of patients with single metastases from colorectal cancers was performed. Four German Thoracic Surgery units contributed data from their prospective metastasectomy databases. Statistical analysis was focused on tumor recurrence and risk factors for local margin recurrence. Results: 166 patients from four centers could be further analyzed. For later comparison, 93 (56%) anatomic resections and 73 (44%) non-anatomic resections were pooled. Tumor recurrence was detected: at any site 87/161 (54%), within the lung 62/161 (38.5%) at intrapulmonary margins 25/145 (17.2%) and in intrathoracic lymph nodes 14/138 (10.1%). Intrapulmonary local margin recurrence was more often found in non-anatomic (25.4%) versus anatomic (11.6%) resections (p = 0.052). After propensity score matching (PSM), local margin recurrence was significantly more frequent after non-anatomic resection of intermediate and peripherally located metastases (p = 0.042). Furthermore, local margin recurrence was associated with small safety margins (p < 0.001), small number of lymph nodes removed (p < 0.001) and with intrathoracic lymph node recurrence (p = 0.001). The 5- and 10-year OS of the whole group was 70% and 47% with a median survival of 9.0 years. The 5- and 10-year RFS of the whole group was 59% and 43% with a median of 7.3 years. Conclusions: This study demonstrates that anatomical resection of single CRC lung metastases is superior to non-anatomic resection with respect to local radicality and local intrapulmonary margin recurrence, but there was no difference in OS and RFS.

Introduction Performing a routine postoperative chest X-ray (CXR) after general thoracic surgery is daily practice in many thoracic surgery departments. The quality, frequency of pathological findings and the clinical consequences have not been well evaluated. Furthermore, exposure to ionising radiation should be restricted to a minimum and therefore routine practice can be questioned. Methods As a hospital standard, each patient was given a routine CXR after opening of the pleura and inserting a chest tube. From October 2015 to March 2016, each postoperative patient with a routine CXR was included in a prospective database, including film quality, pathological findings, clinical and laboratory results and cardiorespiratory monitoring, as well as clinical consequences. Results 546 patients were included. Risk factors for postoperative complications were obesity in 50 patients (9.2%), emphysema in 127 patients (23.3%), coagulopathy in 34 patients (6.2%), longer operation time (more than two hours) in 242 patients (44.3%) and previous lung irradiation in 29 (5.3%) of patients. Major lung resections were performed in 191 patients (35.9%). 263 (48.2%) patients had procedures with minimally invasive access. The quality of the X-ray film was insufficient in 8.2% of patients. 90 (16.5%) of CXRs were found to show pathological findings, with a trend for more pathological findings after open surgery (55/283; 19.4%) compared to minimally invasive surgery (35/263; 13.3%) (p = 0.064). 11 (2.0%) patients needed a surgical or clinical intervention during postoperative observation; this corresponds to 12.2% of patients with a pathological finding on CXR. Nine of these 11 patients were clinically symptomatic and only two (0.37%) patients were asymptomatic with a relevant pneumothorax. Conclusions Our study cannot support routine postoperative CXR after general thoracic procedures and we believe that restriction to clinically symptomatic cases should be a safe option.