The Treatment of Patients with Early-Stage Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Who Are Not Candidates or Decline Surgical Resection: The Role of Radiation and Image-Guided Thermal Ablation

The standard of care for early-stage NSCLC has historically been surgical resection. Given the association of lung cancer with smoking, a large number of early-stage patients also have active smoking-related medical comorbidities such as COPD precluding surgery. The current approach for treating such inoperable patients is frequently considered to be stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT). SBRT (also known as stereotactic ablative radiation therapy or SABR) is a curative modality that precisely delivers very high dose radiation in few (typically <5) sessions. That said, because of their minimal invasiveness and repeatable nature, image-guided thermal ablation therapies such as radiofrequency ablation (RFA), microwave ablation (MWA), and cryoablation (CA) have also been used to treat early-stage lung tumors. For those patients deemed to have “high operative risk” (i.e., those who cannot tolerate lobectomy, but are candidates for sublobar resection), the appropriateness of potential alternatives [e.g., SBRT; ablation] to surgery is an active area of investigation. In the absence of completed randomized phase III trials, the approach to comparing outcomes between surgery, SBRT, or ablative therapies by their efficacy or equivalence is complex. An overview of the role of SBRT and other non-surgical modalities in the management of early-stage lung cancer is the subject of the present review.