Management of a patient with an unexpected obstructing carinal mass.

Surgical procedures involving the airway or for mediastinal masses present considerable challenges for the anesthesiologist. Aside from the obvious technical challenges of providing ventilation, the anesthesiologist must share the airway with the surgeon. Careful and meticulous preoperative evaluation and preparation and intraoperative interaction with the surgical team is critical to assure control of the airway.

Fluoro-deoxy-glucose positron emission tomography for evaluation of indeterminate lung nodules: assigning a probability of malignancy may be preferable to binary readings.

Objective: To assess the diagnostic value of fluorine-18 fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) using standard uptake values (SUV) in the differential diagnoses of indeterminate pulmonary nodules. Specifically, we assessed the probability of malignancy for various SUV ranges, and compared the diagnostic efficacy of SUV with and without correction for partial volume effects on the basis of lesion size.

Methods: The FDG-PET scans performed on 158 patients with biopsy-proven pulmonary lesions seen on computed tomography (CT) scan were retrospectively reviewed.

Preemptive epidural analgesia for thoracic surgery.

The purpose of this study was to determine if preemptive epidural analgesia performed before thoracotomy incision and during the operation reduces postoperative pain. Patients in the treatment group received 8 mL of 0.25% bupivacaine and 2 mL of fentanyl (50 microg/mL) via the epidural route prior to skin incision, followed by an infusion of bupivacaine 0.

Metachronous cancers or late recurrences after resection of stage I lung cancer.

In 2 patients with stage I lung cancer, tumors recurred at their resection lines 10 years after the original surgical resections. These cases suggest that the prognosis of late cancer occurrences after resected primary lung malignancies might be related to the interval of time between primary and subsequent cancers rather than to their categorization as recurrent or metachronous cancers.