Pretreatment identification of micro-metastasis in mediastinal lymph node by endobronchial ultrasound-guided transbronchial needle aspiration for early-stage non-small cell lung cancer—is it time yet?

The dissemination of malignancy to the locoregional lymph nodes (LNs) impacts the prognosis for most cancer types. However, routine LN histopathological examination will occasionally miss smaller tumor deposits. A case in point is breast cancer. The likelihood of identifying a small (three-cell diameter) metastatic focus of cancer in a regional LN is approximately 1% for early-stage breast cancer (1).