A comprehensive review of surgery for inflammatory thoracic diseases

“Knowledge, like air, is vital to life. Like air, no one should be denied it.”—Alan Moore.

The Asia Thoracoscopic Education Platform (ATEP), team works relentlessly on this principle in its quest to promote unmatched standards of thoracic and thoracoscopic surgery education across Asia.

In line with our philosophy to create valuable scientific content for our members we partnered with the Journal of Visualized Surgery and came up with a special edition on a subject less talked about—“Infection and Inflammation”.

Eminent surgeons from Japan, South Korea, Turkey, Thailand, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan have contributed rich articles on various common infectious and inflammatory thoracic surgery pathologies for this edition.

We sincerely hope the readers would enjoy it as much as we did getting it all together.

Acknowledgments

Funding: None.

Footnote

Provenance and Peer Review: This article was commissioned by the editorial office, Journal of Visualized Surgery for the series “Asia Thoracoscopic Surgery Education Program (ATEP) Special Issue on Inflammatory Thoracic Diseases". The article did not undergo external peer review.

Conflicts of Interest: The author has completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form (available at http://dx.doi.org/10.21037/jovs.2019.03.02). The series “Asia Thoracoscopic Surgery Education Program (ATEP) Special Issue on Inflammatory Thoracic Diseases” was commissioned by the editorial office without any funding or sponsorship. KA served as the unpaid Guest Editor of the series. The author has no other conflicts of interest to declare.

Ethical Statement: The author is accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Open Access Statement: This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits the non-commercial replication and distribution of the article with the strict proviso that no changes or edits are made and the original work is properly cited (including links to both the formal publication through the relevant DOI and the license). See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Kamran Ali