Future Trends in Preoperative Evaluation

Preoperative evaluation before major thoracic procedures is aimed at classifying patients according to their probability of adverse postoperative outcomes and the estimated effectiveness of the surgical procedure. Although knowledge about perioperative physiologic changes has increased, clinicians are still far from finding a way to put this knowledge down and make it applicable for an individual patient. Multicentric cooperation and evaluation of large prospectively recorded databases are essential to develop evidence-based clinical guidelines on preoperative evaluation.