Key Points

• Surgical resection is the preferred of treatment of patients with early-stage non-small cell lung cancer who have acceptable surgical risk.
• Ablative techniques such as stereotactic ablative radiotherapy, radiofrequency ablation, microwave ablation, and cryotherapy are good alternatives to surgical resection for medically inoperable patients with stage I and node-negative stage II (T1-3, N0, M0) NSCLC.
• In NSCLC patients considered for non-resectional approaches, a thorough evaluation of mediastinal and N1 nodal stations is important and may require invasive pathologic nodal sampling.