Establishment of Mongolia's first independent and sustainable minimally invasive general thoracic surgery program: A Mongolian-Canadian initiative
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective: The advent of video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery in Mongolia has faced funding and accessibility challenges, leading to languid adoption. A Mongolian-Canadian collaboration was inaugurated to support the development of a self-sustainable, self-governed minimally invasive thoracic surgery (MITS) program in Mongolia. Methods: A multidisciplinary Canadian thoracic surgery team collaborated with the National Cancer Center of Mongolia Thoracic Surgery service from 2016 to 2023. The team engaged in patient rounds, MITS procedures, and service education. Program and patient outcomes were reviewed. Results: Thirty-four patients underwent MITS procedures as part of the Mongolian-Canadian collaboration. Median age was 51 years (range, 16-76 years), and 41% (14 out of 34) were men. Lung, esophageal, and mediastinal procedures composed 50% (17 out of 34), 21% (7 out of 34), and 21% (7 out of 34) of procedures, respectively. Conversion rate, median operative time, and hospital length of stay were 0%, 172.5 minutes, and 8 days, respectively. The complication rate was 9% (3 out of 34) with 3% (1 out of 34) being Clavien-Dindo >3 requiring re-operation. Thirty-day mortality was 0%. Mongolia's thoracic surgery team progressed from surgical assists to primary operators and a self-governed program. In 2023, the National Cancer Center of Mongolia's thoracic surgery service independently conducted 72% (50 out of 69) of esophagectomies and 91% (48 out of 53) of pulmonary resections via minimally invasive technique compared with 0% in 2015. Conclusions: The Mongolian-Canadian collaboration demonstrated successful transfer of MITS proficiency through global noncolonialist surgical partnership, consequentially shifting the national thoracic surgical paradigm. Continued collaboration will focus on sustainability and supporting local surgeons in regional dissemination of MITS proficiency with the aim of globalizing thoracic surgical excellence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".