Lung cancer staging

Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer related death in the World. Accurate staging is essential to make estimates of prognosis and to choose the best combination of treatment modalities. Numerous are the clinical staging procedures, some invasive and some non invasive. The non invasive imaging modalities can be subdivided in Morphologic like CT and MRI and functional like PET and PET-CT. Defining malignant involvement of the hilar and most importantly mediastinal lymphnodes is important as the status of these nodes will in many cases determine where there is surgically resectable disease. A widely accep…