Traditional approaches to managing occluded airways include surgery, mechanical debulking, brachytherapy, stents, photody-namic therapy, and thermal modalities, such as electrocautery, laser, argon plasma coagulation, and cryotherapy. Although cryotherapy with cryoprobes has been used safely for over a decade in airways management, it is often tedious and time-consuming because of surface area limitations of the probes, which must be inserted into or come in contact with the surface of the targeted lesion. Newer cryotherapy devices obviate the need,for contact with the target tissue. Reports of promising results from use of low-pressure spray cryotherapy for ablation of esophageal lesions1"2 have led to the experience reported here, in which spray cryotherapy with low-pressure liquid nitrogen was used for the first time to treat human airways.
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