ABSTRACT
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States; it kills more people than colon cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and pancreatic cancer combined (Jemal et al. 2010). Evidence suggests that early detection of lung cancer may allow for timely therapeutic intervention and thus a favorable prognosis for patients (Flehinger et al. 1992). Patients with clinical stage I lung cancer who underwent surgical resection within 1 month after diagnosis had an estimated 10-year survival rate of 92% (Henschke et al. 2006). erefore, in the 1970s, screening programs for early detection of lung cancer were carried
out with chest radiography and cytologic examination of sputum in the United States (Flehinger et al. 1984; Fontana et al. 1984; Frost et al. 1984) as well as in Europe (Kubik and Polak 1986). As the computed tomography (CT) imaging techniques have advanced, screening with low-dose CT has been performed in the United States (Henschke et al. 1999) and Japan (Sone et al. 1998) since early 1990. e National Lung Screening Trial investigators report that subjects undergoing three annual screening examinations with lowdose CT had a 20% reduction in lung cancer mortality as compared with those screened with annual chest radiography (Aberle et al. 2011).
