Abstract
Video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS) has gained wide and rapid acceptance since the development of automatic endoscopic suture instruments. VATS, being a minimally invasive surgery, is a good option for airway reconstruction surgeries aiming to preserve pulmonary function. Therefore, VATS tracheobronchoplasty is preferable in high-risk patients. However, many surgeons think that tracheobronchoplasty is too complex to be performed using VATS because of the absence of automatic suture instruments for airway reconstruction. Therefore, to date, VATS tracheobronchoplasty is not a popular operation, except at a few pioneering institutions. We have successfully used VATS to perform airway reconstruction, including mediastinal tracheoplasty, without using any special instruments or high-skilled techniques. We explain our technique for performing VATS tracheobronchoplasty in this article. We hope that this article will contribute to increasing the popularity of VATS tracheobronchoplasty.
