Long-term outcomes and quality of life should be the future focus of research measuring effectiveness of lung cancer surgery approaches

The manuscript by Cerfolio et al. begins to fill a gap in the robotic lung cancer surgery literature by demonstrating long term follow up data for patients. This group of 4 separate institutions has combined data from 1,339 patients to show 5 year stage-specific survival and to be able to use this as a potential future benchmark for robotics, thoracoscopic, and open lung cancer surgery.