Summary: Malignant anterior mediastinal tumors essentially include lymphomas and thymomas. The location of mediastinum is anatomically close to several critical organs such as heart, lung, and breasts, which might be affected meaningfully when the mediastinal region is irradiated. There have been quite a few studies investigating long-term toxicities concerning the above critical organs and risks of second...

Summary: Extended thymectomy is the main treatment for thymoma and other anterior mediastinal diseases. Video-assisted thoracic surgery(VATS) plays an important role in the surgery of extended thymectomy. Now, VATS thymectomy through intercostal approach has been the commonly used minimally invasive surgical procedure for thymus surgery and is applied worldwide. But the intercostal approach may cause resid...

Summary: Thoracoscopic assisted mediastinal thymectomy is currently one of the most commonly used surgical methods, but there are some deficiencies.Minimally invasive surgery through the subxiphoid approach can achieve a good surgical field of vision. (1) The surgical field is fully exposed. (2) damage to intercostal nerves can be avoided.(3) Operation time, intraoperative blood loss, postoperative Extubat...

Summary: Surgery plays an important role in the treatment of anterior mediastinum disease. The major surgical approaches include: cervical approach, mid-sternal approach, cervical combined mid-sternal approach and video-assisted thoracoscopic approach. The cervical approach is rarely adopted because of its restricted visual field. The cervical combined mid-sternal approach have a broader field of vision, g...