Professor Stefano Margaritora: my journey with uniportal VATS

Editor’s note

After 3 days’ course, the 4^th International Uniportal VATS Course-Live Surgery and Wetlab had come to an end in Berlin on 4^th March 2017. We were glad that Professor Stefano Margaritora, the head of Department of General Thoracic Surgery in Catholic University of Rome, Italy, had accepted the interview by our journal Video-Assisted Thoracic Surgery (VATS).

Since his first uniportal video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (uniportal VATS) in May 2016, Professor Margaritora and his team have already done more than 120 uniportal cases till the date of this interview. Catholic University of the Sacred Heart is one of the few institutes that perform uniportal VATS in Italy. Why have they chosen uniportal VATS? How do they feel after doing uniportal VATS? What is the cost of uniportal VATS? How to educate and train surgeons on this new technique? Professor Margaritora has answered all these questions in the interview. This in another hand provides a window for us to understand more about the development of Uniportal VATS in Italy.

For more details, please enjoy the interview video (Figure 1).

Figure 1 Professor Stefano Margaritora: my journey with uniportal VATS (1). Available online: http://www.asvide.com/articles/1688

Interview questions

• Would you like to introduce your first case of doing uniportal VATS in your career?
• What’s the main factor that made you decide to do uniportal VATS at that time?
• What do you think is the largest challenge when performing uniportal VATS?
• Would you like to introduce the development of uniportal VATS in your country/hospital?
• What is the cost of one uniportal VATS in your hospital?
• If you can use four words to describe uniportal VATS, what words would you choose?

Acknowledgments

Funding: None.

Footnote

Provenance and Peer Review: This article was commissioned by the editorial office, Video-Assisted Thoracic Surgery. The article did not undergo external peer review.

Conflicts of Interest: The authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form (available at http://dx.doi.org/10.21037/vats.2017.08.05). The authors report that they are full-time employees of AME publishing company (publisher of the journal).

Ethical Statement: The authors are accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Open Access Statement: This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits the non-commercial replication and distribution of the article with the strict proviso that no changes or edits are made and the original work is properly cited (including links to both the formal publication through the relevant DOI and the license). See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

References

1. He CX, Lun C. Professor Stefano Margaritora: my journey with uniportal VATS. Asvide 2017;4:374. Available online: http://www.asvide.com/articles/1688

[Science Editors: Chao-Xiu (Melanie) He, Cliff Lun, VATS. Email: vats@amegroups.com]