Treatment Options Overview
The Emory General Thoracic Surgery Center is consistently ranked among the nation's top academic centers in clinical volume and has a reputation for providing the finest thoracic surgical services in the region. Our program emphasizes access to the most current methods of minimally invasive thoracic surgery to our patients, and our surgeons are considered state-wide leaders in the performance of these procedures.
One of the many areas in which our physicians excel is video-assisted thoracic surgery (VATS). Considered a major advancement in the treatment of many medical conditions, VATS is a minimally invasive surgical method that allows our surgeons to perform procedures through small openings or ports. Specially designed surgical devices are inserted through these ports for removal of diseased tissue, fluid drainage, and repair of damaged areas. One of these devices is a small camera called a thoracoscope, which projects the procedure on a video monitor and allows the surgeon to magnify the image of the surgical target. Compared with traditional open surgery, VATS procedures cause less physical injury to the patient's body while allowing the surgeon to perform a highly effective procedure.
Our outstanding surgeons are full-time faculty members of the Department of Surgery of the Emory University School of Medicine, one of the nation's top institutions for biomedical education, research and patient care, and have established impressive track records in their specialties. For example, as a fellow in thoracic and cardiovascular surgery at the Mayo Clinic, Dr. Daniel Miller did the first thoracoscopic surgery ever performed there in 1991, and upon his arrival at Emory, he initiated the Emory Hyperhidrosis Center, the only service of its type in Georgia offering minimally invasive microthoracoscopic sympathectomy for treating hyperhidrosis. Since coming to Emory in 2003, Dr. Seth Force, surgical director of Emory's lung transplant program, has overseen the tripling of the number of lung transplants performed per year by the adult lung transplant service. In 2009 the lung program transplanted the greatest number of lungs at Emory in a single year, a 35% increase over 2008, which Dr. Force attributed to improvements in the donor program and the addition of Dr. Allan Pickens and Dr. Felix Fernandez to the transplant team.
