On May 26, a patient with lung cancer, who was supervised by Prof. Jane Li, the director of thoracic surgery of our hospital, and led by Dr. Shijie Zhang, the deputy chief surgeon, completed the first “single-operating hole total thoracoscopic left lower lobe resection and partial resection of the left second rib” in China. This is a middle-aged female patient who was found to have a 2 cm diameter mass in the lower lobe of the left lung during a physical examination (one week ago) without any complaints of discomfort. From the normal CT scan results, the doctors highly suspected a malignant tumor and arranged a staging examination for the patient; the PET-CT results supported the diagnosis of “left lower lung cancer” and also found suspicious metastasis in the left second anterior rib. In order to formulate a treatment plan, the surgical team of Professor Jane Li, director of the Department of Thoracic Surgery, held a detailed discussion and, according to the guidance of the 2014 edition of the Expert Consensus on the Treatment of Bone Metastases from Lung Cancer, the patient was considered to have an indication for surgery. Although our hospital has been performing single-operator lobectomy for many years and the technique has matured, this is the first attempt to perform rib resection under a single-operator hole, which is quite difficult due to the complex anatomy of the location of the second rib (especially the anterior rib), which is extremely risky, and the need to overcome the difficulty of mismatching surgical instruments. Under the guidance of Professor Jane Li, a famous thoracic surgeon in China, Dr. Shijie Zhang, the deputy chief surgeon, performed the surgery, which went smoothly and the postoperative pathology confirmed the preoperative judgment. Minimally invasive surgery, i.e. thoracoscopic surgery, has always been a hot topic in thoracic surgery and is of greater concern to patients. Nowadays, the proportion of fully thoracoscopic operations in thoracic surgical treatment is gradually increasing, and more and more units are carrying out. With the development of technology, thoracoscopic surgery of high difficulty has become one of the hot topics in the academic field, including “thoracoscopic rib resection”. In this year’s 94th Annual American Association of Thoracic Surgery (AATS), the American colleagues reported cases involving thoracoscopic first rib resection; in 2013, China reported a case of “double-operator thoracoscopic rib resection” for a patient with primary rib tumor, and there is no “single-operator total rib resection”. There is no report of “single-operator total thoracoscopic rib resection”. Previously, lung cancer with chest wall invasion was not considered suitable for thoracoscopic surgery, but this experience shows that thoracoscopic surgery is also suitable for the treatment of this type of tumor. Under the leadership of Prof. Jane Li, the Department of Thoracic Surgery of our hospital has been persisting in exploring minimally invasive surgery for many years, and has carried out many exploratory surgeries in a minimally invasive manner without any precedent to learn from, which has a high influence in China. The “single-operating-hole total thoracoscopic rib resection”, which was performed with conventional instruments, is a new level of minimally invasive thoracoscopic surgery in China.