Question: My doctor told me that I will have a wedge resection to treat my stage 1 (I) lung cancer. What is this procedure?   

(Answered by Dr. Jeffery B. Velotta from Kaiser Permanente – Oakland during his appearance at the June 2024 Lung Cancer Living Room. It has been edited for this use.) 

Answer:  

A wedge resection is a type of lung cancer surgery. It is called a “wedge” resection because we are actually taking a little wedge, like a wedge of pizza, from your lung. The goal of a wedge resection, like other lung cancer surgeries, is to get rid of the cancer or tumor locally, while at the same time trying to spare as much other tissue as we can.  

Regardless of how the wedge resection is performed (open surgery, laparoscopic, robotic), we take a stapler, and we go in and cut out the nodule. The stapler seals it at the same time. These are usually pretty quick surgeries, and people usually heal well from them. Wedge resections help to save healthy lung tissue, which could be important because leaving more of this healthy tissue may help you have a higher quality of life after surgery.  

Wedge resections are typically done for smaller nodules. Historically, we thought we needed to take out a lobe of the lung through something called a lobectomy for all lung tumors, but a few newer studies have shown that tumors that are less than 2 cm can do just as well and save more lung than with a lobectomy if you do a wedge resection or something called a segmentectomy instead.

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