[Surgical resection of pulmonary metastases from colorectal carcinoma in our hospital].

Pulmonary metastases from colorectal carcinoma are not rare next to liver metastases. Lung resection has been widely accepted, but postoperatively local lung recurrence has been seen in the wedge resection procedures. In our hospital, specimen of the wedge resection was histologically reviewed and revealed floating cancer cell clusters around the main tumor. The cause of the recurrence was supposed to be floating clusters or a technical problem of surgical margin in the video-associated thoracic surgery. Since 2004, we used 3-dimensional CT and identified the pulmonary segmental area of peripheral metastatic tumor less than 2.0 cm in diameter. From 1986 to 2003, we performed 18 cases of lung resection and found that recurrent cases were 25 to 64%. On the other hand, we detected 0 to 16% recurrence cases in 12 patients during the period of 2004-2007. We recommend segmentectomy to metastatic tumor less than 2.0 cm in diameter from colorectal carcinoma.