The department was established in 1962 and has pioneered the areas of lung cancer and bronchial diseases with consistent research and advanced procedures. In addition, the department has performed some 50 cases of heart surgery each year since performing a highly difficult open heart revision successfully on a patient diagnosed with Fallot's tetralogy, a congenital heart disease, in 1978. Furthermore, the department established the Cardiovascular Center in 1998 and has since gone on to perform a variety of internationally acknowledged procedures. The department has performed extended lymph node dissection in the surgery of lung cancer and esophageal cancer since 1995, while in the case of esophageal cancer, the three-region lymph node dissection technique has been applied to minimize postoperative local recurrence; the results have been reported at the Korean Society for Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery where they received wide acclaim and considerable attention.