Do you perform EBUS-TBNA for staging in patients with biopsy proven malignant lung nodules with no lymphadenopathy on CT chest and PET scan?

I agree that incidence is low, but estimates for radiographically occult nodal disease range from 10-20% and the fact is there isn't great literature on this. A PET scan is a decent test, better than a regular CT, but there are still a significant minority of patients that are mis-staged when an EBU...

We all want to know whether our patients with apparent stage I NSCLC have metastatic disease or not. That's because it determines whether to add systemic therapy on top of local therapy (surgery or SBRT or even thermal ablation). The elephant in the room is whether the discovery of a metastatic phen...

Great question. Very controversial. What you try to avoid is having a surgeon resect a nodule and then discover upstaging on surgery. We are leaning more toward performing EBUS prior to surgical resections. We know that a segmentectomy works for most stages 1 but if it becomes a stage 2 this is no l...