Review Article Minimally Invasive Thoracic Surgery in Pediatric Patients: The Taiwan Experience

Copyright © 2013 Yu-Kai Huang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Minimally invasive technology or laparoscopic surgery underwent a major breakthrough over the past two decades. The first experience of thoracoscopy in children was reported around 1980 for diagnosis of intrathoracic pathology and neoplasia. Up until themiddle of the 1990s, the surgical community in Taiwanwas still not well prepared to accept the coming era ofminimally invasive surgery. In the beginning, laparoscopy was performed in only a few specialties and only relatively short or simple surgeries were considered. But now, the Taiwan’s experiences over the several different clinical scenarios were dramatically increased.Therefore, we elaborated on the experience about pectus excavatum: Nuss procedure, primary spontaneous hemopneumothorax, thoracoscopic thymectomy, and empyema in Taiwan. 1