Staged bronchial closure in uniportal video-assisted thoracoscopic anatomical resection for lung cancer with calcified lymph nodes

Uniportal video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS) makes a breakthrough in these years. Even we have gained more experience and surgical skills of uniportal VATS, some elements, such as calcified perivascular lymph nodes, make the surgery challenging. In this series, we used staged bronchial closure (cut the bronchus first and then close it with stapler after dividing the pulmonary artery with calcified lymph node) as an approach for dealing with this challenging issue. Though the rate of intraoperative vessel injury is relatively high, we obtained ideal surgical outcome by using this technique in different lobes and segment of the lung.