Totally no Tube (TNT) Uniportal Video-assisted Thoracoscopic Surgery (VATS) VS Traditional Uniportal VATS for Mediastinal Tumor: A Prospective Randomized Controlled Trial

This study was designed as a single-center prospective randomized controlled trial. The trial recruited patients aged from 18 to 75 years with a diagnosis of mediastinal tumor. Preoperative chest CT examination showed that shape of the mediastinal tumor was regular, boundary was clear, and maximum diameter of the mass was less than 4 cm. Other inclusion criteria included capability of giving consent and adequate organ function to tolerate uniportal thoracoscopy mediastinal tumor resection. The exclusion criteria are described as follows: preoperative examination showed that the tumor invaded the surrounding blood vessels, pericardium, lung and other tissues or had distant metastasis; preoperative complications include severe coronary heart disease, arrhythmia and other serious cardiopulmonary diseases; large masses, difficult surgical procedures; manifestations of myasthenia gravis; hypovolemia, blood disorders, or abnormal clotting mechanism; pulmonary function and arterial blood gas analysis showed that patients could not tolerate surgery; previous thoracotomy; inability to obtain consent. Furthermore, the exclusion criteria were defifined as follows: intraoperative pleural adhesion or technical challenge to achieve hemostasis that make conversion from VATS to thoracotomy; clinician decides the patient should not continue the trial according to individual condition; patient withdraws from the trial. According to International Conference on Harmonisation, all participants gave written informed consent. Our RCT was launched in April 2018, which conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and good clinical practice according to the International Conference on Harmonization guidelines. The ethics committee of The Fourth Affiliated Hospital of Medical Sciences, Liaoning, China, approved this study (approval number: EC-2018-HS-01).

After eligibility had been confirmed and inform consents obtained, the investigator registered patients to ensure allocation concealment. Next we randomly enrolled patients to TNT group and control group in accordance with a list of randomization numbers. This list was generated in the trial statistician's computer. Allocation was communicated by telephone by the trial coordinator. Neither patients nor any investigators were masked to treatment allocation.

The patients underwent routine physical examination, hematologic and biochemical tests, arterial blood gas analysis, pulmonary function test and computed tomography. Uniportal VATS mediastinal tumor resection was the standard surgical intervention according to the protocol. Patients in TNT group underwent TNT uniportal VATS mediastinal tumor resection, patients in control group underwent traditional uniportal VATS. Pre-, peri-, and postoperative details and outcome variables of patients were collected.