Single incision thoracoscopic lobectomy through a 2.5 cm skin incision

Single incision thoracoscopic surgery (SITS) involves only one intercostal space with minimal skin incision, which means it can be the most minimally invasive surgery up to date. SITS has been mainly used for simple thoracic procedures since the first application by Rocco in 2000 (1). The advancement of surgical techniques and instruments led to the introduction of SITS lobectomy by Gonzalez in 2011 (2). Several clinical series demonstrated that SITS lobectomy had similar efficacy to 3-port video-assisted thoracic surgery (VATS) lobectomy (3,4). However, reports in the literature on SITS lobectomy were almost exclusively devoted to the treatment of lung cancers. Unlikely lung cancer surgery, SITS lobectomy for benign pulmonary disease has advantage for extracting the lobar specimen from a small incision and no need for mediastinal lymph node (LN) dissection