Thoracic surgery in United Arab Emirates.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has undergone a significant change in its population and economy in the last decades and in parallel its healthcare system has evolved rapidly to provide advanced, innovative and world-leading care. At the forefront of this revolution in healthcare is the development of a multidisciplinary multimodality thoracic service provision, offered at quaternary referral hospitals amalgamating academics, training, research and innovation. Previously, thoracic service care was limited to single providers at various public and private hospitals, usually performing lower complexity cases. Most complex thoracic cases were repatriated outside the UAE. This practice was replaced with the opening of Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi (CCAD), in 2015, which created a multidisciplinary thoracic program. This included the start of a mini-invasive surgical and lung transplantation program. Since that time other public and private hospitals have emerged providing care in a similar model. The impact of these programs has been a decreased transfer of patients abroad for treatment. Under the umbrella of the Emirates Thoracic Society (ETS) a platform for greater collaboration aimed at improving patient care, potential research and physician education has been created. Direct links have been established with world-leading Thoracic surgery and Respiratory Medicine Centers facilitating this development and offering support and guidance. This article charts these changes in thoracic care in the recent past, present, and delineates plans for the future in the UAE.

Pulmonary cavitation: an under-recognized late complication of severe COVID-19 lung disease.

BACKGROUND: Pulmonary radiological findings of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have been well documented and range from scattered ground-glass infiltrates in milder cases to confluent ground-glass change, dense consolidation, and crazy paving in the critically ill. However, lung cavitation has not been commonly described in these patients. The objective of this study was to assess the incidence of pulmonary cavitation in patients with COVID-19 and describe its characteristics and evolution. METHODS: We conducted a retrospective review of all patients admitted to our institution with COVID-19 and reviewed electronic medical records and imaging to identify patients who developed pulmonary cavitation. RESULTS: Twelve out of 689 (1.7%) patients admitted to our institution with COVID-19 developed pulmonary cavitation, comprising 3.3% (n = 12/359) of patients who developed COVID-19 pneumonia, and 11% (n = 12/110) of those admitted to the intensive care unit. We describe the imaging characteristics of the cavitation and present the clinical, pharmacological, laboratory, and microbiological parameters for these patients. In this cohort six patients have died, and six discharged home. CONCLUSION: Cavitary lung disease in patients with severe COVID-19 disease is not uncommon, and is associated with a high level of morbidity and mortality.

Metastatic pulmonary calcifications postcardiac transplant in a 15-year-old patient: A case report and review of literature.

Metastatic pulmonary calcification is a metabolic lung disease that occurs due to a prolonged hypercalcemic state where calcium salts precipitate into numerous foci or nodules of fluffy calcifications in the lung apices, usually bilaterally. Calcifications can also occur in other organs such as in the stomach and the kidneys. It is often underdiagnosed and is usually associated with end stage renal failure and resultant secondary hyperparathyroidism. Nevertheless, it is rarely reported in the postcardiac surgery status and cardiac transplant patients. We present a case of a 15-year-old male patient with a recent history of cardiac transplant due to a complex congenital heart disease where findings of extensive metastatic pulmonary calcifications were seen a routine follow-up chest radiograph. Clinical manifestations of metastatic pulmonary calcifications can range from having no symptoms or mild dyspnea on exertion to fulminant respiratory failure. Therefore, early recognition of imaging features and initiation of proper management is crucial to the patient's outcome.

Pediatric robot-assisted laparoscopic radical adrenalectomy and lymph-node dissection for neuroblastoma in a 15-month-old.

Neuroblastoma (NB) is the most common extra-cranial solid tumor in children and the most common malignancy in infants, with complete resection being curative in low-stage disease. The previous standard of treatment for many abdominal NBs involving the adrenal gland had been open surgery; however, there have been numerous descriptions of the safety and feasibility of a laparoscopic approach to resect adrenal masses in the pediatric population in benign and malignant disease, including improved cosmetic results, decreased length of stay, decreased surgical morbidity, and comparable oncological outcomes to open surgery. Despite these reported advantages over open surgery, the newer robot-assisted laparoscopy (RAL) offers benefits over the conventional laparoscopic approach that could further improve outcomes and expand the use of minimally invasive surgical approaches for pediatric adrenal masses. RAL offers many additional advantages over conventional laparoscopy, such as 3D visualization, increased range of motion of surgical instruments, tremor control, and a shorter learning curve compared with traditional laparoscopic surgery, while still maintaining the advantages of minimally invasive surgery. The body of literature concerning robot-assisted oncological surgery involving the adrenal gland in children is quite small, and to our knowledge no case reports have been published describing robot-assisted removal of an adrenal NB in a pediatric patient. We present our experience and technique of an RAL approach for lymph-node dissection and radical resection of a low-stage NB involving the adrenal gland with no image-defined risk factors in a 15-month-old infant.