Value of chest CT scans for predicting surgical resectability of lung cancer

In order to find out the correlation between chest CT scanning and operative finding, a series of 102 patients with lung cancer were analysed. Lobectomy was performed in 88 cases and exploration in 14 cases because the lesion infiltrated the ipsilateral mediastinal lymph nodes. The operations confirmed that there were 28 cases with mediastinal pleural invasion of carcinoma, 20 cases with spread to the chest wall or pleura, 43 cases with enlarged mediastinal lymph nodes (greater than or equal to 1.0cm) and 37 cases with microscopic metastasis. The preoperative chest CT of these patients showed that the carcinoma involved mediastinum and pleura in 25 and 16 cases respectively, and the enlarged mediastinal lymph nodes were present in 37 cases besides 6 cases of pseudonegative shadow. The sensitivity of metastatic mediastinal lymph nodes diagnosed by chest CT was 86%, specificity 89.3%, and accuracy 88%. We believe that the chest CT scanning is valuable in diagnosis of lung cancer and prediction of surgical resectability of the lesion.