Figure 5.

Survival in patients with NSCLC according to stage and diagnostic strategy. A, Patients with stage II NSCLC. B, Patients with stage III NSCLC. Diagnostic strategy is shown for each stage as follows: guideline-consistent care with mediastinal sampling performed first (solid line), guideline-inconsistent care with mediastinal sampling performed second or later (long-dashed line), and guideline-inconsistent care with no mediastinal sampling (short-dashed line). Staging was done using the American Joint Commission on Cancer third edition staging guidelines because cases occurring prior to 2004 did not have sufficient detail to use the sixth edition. consist = guideline-consistent care; media = mediastinal sampling. See Figure 1 legend for expansion of other abbreviation.