Predictive factors for invasive adenocarcinoma in patients with clinical non-invasive or minimally invasive lung cancer

Lung cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer deaths in Korea. Recently, the use of chest computed tomography (CT) for lung cancer screening and early-stage lung cancer detection has increased (1), and with advances in technology, the detection of ground-glass opacity (GGO) has also increased remarkably. Persistent GGO is considered to be a precursor lesion of lung cancer or an early stage lung cancer (2,3). However, surgical removal of all persistent GGO lesions is controversial. This is because many lesions observed in GGOs do not progress but persist in the same size or morphology for many years (4,5)