Radio-guided lung surgery: a feasible approach for a cancer precision medicine

Background: Radio-guided surgery is a reliable approach used for localizing ground-glass opacities, lung nodules, and metastatic lymph nodes. Lung nodules, lymph node metastatic involvement, and ground-glass opacities often represent a challenge for surgical management and clinical work-up. Methods: PubMed research was conducted from January 1997 to June 2023 using the keywords "radioguided surgery and lung cancer". Results: Different studies were conducted with different tracers: technetium-99m-albumin macroaggregates, cyanoacrylate combined to technetium-99m-sulfur colloid, indium-111-pentetreotide, and fluorine-18-deoxyglucose. A study proposed naphthalocyanine radio-labeled with copper-64. Radio-guided surgery has been demonstrated to be a reliable approach in localizing a lesion, and has a low radiological burden for personnel exposure and low morbidity. The lack of necessity to conduct radio-guided surgery under fluoroscopy or echography makes this radio-guided surgery an easy way of performing precise surgical procedures. Conclusions: Radio-guided surgery is a feasible approach useful for the intraoperative localization of ground-glass opacities, lung nodules, and metastatic lymph nodes. It is a valid alternative to the existing approaches due to its low cost, associated low morbidity, the possibility to perform the procedure after several hours, the low radiation dose applied, and the small amount of time that is required to perform it.