Interventional pulmonology: Past, present and future

Abstract

Over the last decades, there have been huge progresses in most of fields of medicine, due to a deeper comprehension of pathogenic mechanisms of diseases along with outstanding advance in technology, suitable for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. This applies also to respiratory medicine, in particular to the area of interventional pulmonology, where the development of sophisticated technological tools has revolutionized diagnostic work-up and therapeutic management of relevant pathologies, such as lung cancer, interstitial lung diseases, obstructive lung diseases (COPD) with advanced emphysema, and severe asthma. Most of these innovative approaches have been tested and adopted for the first time in Italy (sometimes in Europe) in our Pulmonary Diseases Unit, currently recognized as one of the most important centers of interventional pulmonology over the world, and daily visited for training by foreigners coming from several countries. In this review, we summarize the leading lines of research carried out by our team over the last decades, in both diagnostic and therapeutic fields of interventional pulmonology, with the subsequent clinical implications.