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Thoracic Surgery

Department of Thoracic Surgery(胸腔外科)

 Our department was established on June 1988 by professor Ming Ho Wu. Until now, sixteen specialist of thoracic surgery has been trained from our department. Professor Wu has retired from our university hospital since 2008. He is still active in thoracic surgery in Tainan Municipal hospital and regularly returns to our hospital for teaching of medical student. Now we have six specialist in our department, including section chief pro. Yau-Lin Tseng, associated professor Wu Wei Lai, clinical associated professor Yi Ting Yen, Doctor Ying Yuan Chen, Wei Li Huang, and Chao chun Chang.
 Our department is the largest center of thoracic surgery in south Taiwan, In the early period, we were dealing with the patients with pulmonary, tuberculosis, corrosive injury and tracheobronchial stenosis. We had published a lot of papers sharing our experiences in treating these patients. Since July 2007, the national insurance of Taiwan covered the operation of video-assisted thoracoscopic lobectomy and wedge resection for lung cancer, we started to perform VATS (video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery) for lung resection, esophageal resection and mediastinal tumor excision. More than 2500 cases of VATS anatomic resections of lung has been performed in our hospital. Our hospital is also the pioneer in performing segmentectomy in Taiwan. We had performed more than 1000 cases of VATS segmentectomy since 2008 which is the largest number of VATS segmentectomy in Taiwan. We started to perform single port VATS since March 2015. Now, more than 90% of thoracic surgery could be performed by single port VATS in our hospital. A lot of thoracic surgeons (from mainland china and southeast Asia) came to our hospital for watching live demonstration of single port VATS segmentectomy or subsegmentectomy. Besides VATS, Our hospital provides robotic surgery for lung, esophageal and mediastinal disease. For the patients with end stage lung benign disease, we could also provide lung transplantation for them.
Because low dose computed tomographic scan is more popularly used for healthy examination and cancer survey, more and more ground glass opacity lesions of lung are found. In the era of precision medicine, we should try to eradicate these lesions with minimal invasive procedure and preserve more lung parenchyma to let patient have better postoperative life quality. Our hospital is now provide 3D reconstruction of lung for preoperative evaluation and indocyanine green for intraoperative lung parenchyma division. Combined with the single port VATS approach, we could provide the most minimally invasive procedures for the patients with lung disease.