Evaluation

The chest CT and DSA images were analyzed by two experienced interventional radiologists. The curative effect of lung recruitment was divided into complete lung recruitment, partial lung recruitment, no lung recruitment, and progressive atelectasis (16). Dyspnea patients were divided into five grades based on dyspnea score (17). In this study, progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) were used as the outcome measures. After treatment with airway stenting and BA-TACE, absence of any serious operation-related event was considered as technical success. An improvement of clinical symptoms or of the atelectasis on CT after SEMS implantation was considered as clinical success.

The adverse events during and after treatment were recorded in detail. Adverse events were graded according to the American standard for common adverse reaction terminology (version 5.0).