Spanish Society of Thoracic Surgery
ReSECT
A permanent, prospective registry of thoracic surgery in Spain turning everyday practice into evidence.
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Departments
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Professionals
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Lung resections
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Operative Log
What ReSECT is
One registry,
built by the surgeons who use it
ReSECT was created in 2022 by the Board of Directors of the SECT as a permanent and dynamic registry of Spanish thoracic surgical activity. It is procedure-based, open to SECT members, specialists and residents, holds a favourable opinion from the Ethics Committee of Aragon and has recruited prospectively since 1 January 2023.
Data model
Three registries, one platform
Each layer answers a different question — what a surgeon does, what a department does and what happens to the patient. All of them run on REDCap.
01
Operative Log
A personal record of surgical activity — retrospective and prospective — documenting the acquisition of skills and the assumption of responsibility along a career.
Data dictionary02
Lung Resection
The departmental process: anatomical lung resection with its perioperative and oncologic subprocesses, from preoperative assessment to staging and follow-up.
Data dictionary03
Thymus
Rolled out in 2026, the Spanish registry devoted to surgery of the thymus gland — the newest process to join the ReSECT family.
Data dictionaryReal-world data
A journey toward precision surgery
Every figure below is computed from the registry at render time — 8,747 anatomical lung resections contributed by 47 departments.
Surgical approach
84%of resections performed through a minimally invasive approach
Type of resection
3days of median postoperative stay across the registry
Procedures by year of surgery
1,956
2023
2,294
2024
2,696
2025
1,676
2026*
229professionals recording their activity across Spain
Postoperative complications
76.3%of patients go through surgery with no recorded complication
* A given year usually closes in April of the following year. Data as of 2 November 2026.
The registry in motion
Four curves that grow every week
Cumulative anatomical lung resections since January 2023 and the oncologic outcome that follows them. Press play on reality.
Staging migration
What we expect versus what we find
Every procedure enters the registry with a clinical stage and leaves it with a pathological one. Each clinical stage below is read as 100%: hover any flow to see where those patients end up.
Lung cancer, as the registry sees it
74%
of patients are found at the stage they were expected to be. Clinical staging holds in three out of four cases.
16%
are upstaged by pathology — disease that imaging and mediastinal staging did not see before surgery.
10%
are downstaged: the tumour turns out to be less advanced than the preoperative work-up suggested.
9%
of patients receive neoadjuvant treatment — chemotherapy, radiotherapy or both — before surgery.
95%
of resections achieve R0 — no residual disease — the surgical goal behind every one of these flows.
Based on 5,966 procedures with both clinical and pathological stage recorded. Staging follows the 8th and 9th TNM editions as registered by each department.
Applications
Your data, back in your hands
Three Shiny applications turn the registry into something usable at the bedside, in the department meeting and in your own career plan.
Benchmarking
Private app to see how your department is performing compared with the whole registry. Promoting quality of care.
Open app
Risk
Public app built on real-world data to better understand our practice and our outcomes. Assisting in decision-making.
Open app
Operative Log
Private app to track the acquisition of surgical skills and responsibilities. Serving your professional career.
Open app
Coming soon
Your registry is about to start answering back
Soon ReSECT will help you predict. compare. audit. decide.
ReSECT has reached an agreement with the Aragón Technological Institute (ITA), a research centre specialised in data science, artificial intelligence and big data, to bring AI-driven features into the platform. Same data you already contribute — a new layer of intelligence on top of it.
In development
Risk models trained here
Prediction built on Spanish real-world data, not borrowed from other populations, feeding decision-making before the patient reaches the operating room.
In development
Ask the registry
Natural-language questions over the data model, so getting an answer no longer requires writing code or waiting for a report. The more departments contribute data, the better it will answer — contributing centres will be the first to benefit.
In development
Quality that checks itself
Automatic detection of missing or inconsistent entries at the moment of capture, turning audit from a yearly verdict into daily feedback.
In development
Benchmarking that explains
Your department measured against the national standard — with a reason behind every deviation from it, not just a number.
Agreement with ITA
Signed
Data protection & governance
Under way
Pilot models
Next
ReSECT Intelligence
Coming
Transparency
Participation
and audit
Contribution is recognised and data quality is measured. Participation reports show what each professional and each department brings to the registry; audit reports check completeness and consistency year by year, including ESTS-oriented auditing.
Users
Individual profiles, activity pace and contribution over time.
ViewDepartments
Department profiles and yearly participation since 2023.
ViewESTS audit
Eligibility and certification readiness for Spanish units.
ViewClinical reports
Lung cancer, postoperative course, resection and approach.
ViewBeyond our borders
A data transfer
agreement with ESTS
Since 2025 ReSECT feeds the European Society of Thoracic Surgeons Database, placing Spanish thoracic surgery on the European map and opening the door to unit certification.
Infrastructure
Built on REDCap
The registry runs on the REDCap platform hosted by the Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud, with local pseudonymisation of patient identifiers and a reproducible Quarto + R pipeline behind every report on this site.
Data protection
Built to comply with the GDPR
A registry only deserves the data it holds if it protects it. ReSECT is designed around the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 and Spanish Organic Law 3/2018, and every department joins under the same rules.
Ethics approval
Favourable opinion of the Clinical Research Ethics Committee of Aragon (CEICA) for the research protocol, with patient informed consent as the basis for inclusion.
Pseudonymisation at source
Patients are coded locally: no identifiers ever leave the department, and only its own research team can link a code back to a person.
Access on a need-to-know basis
REDCap data access groups keep every department inside its own data. Aggregated or fully anonymized data are what reaches this site and the applications.
Impact assessment
New data-science developments, including the work with ITA, go through a data protection impact assessment before a single model is trained.
The full privacy policy is part of the research protocol; the internal regulation governs who may access registry data and for what purpose.
Where we are
A registry with an address
Milestones
From an idea to evidence
2022
The project takes shape
First design presented at the XII SECT Congress in Bilbao, registration on ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT05600569) and activation of the data platform.
2023
Recruitment begins
Prospective inclusion starts on 1 January. The web launches, followed by the Benchmarking and Operative Log applications and the first activated centres.
2024
Participation and audit
Contribution reporting and audit tools go live; ReSECT is presented at the 32nd ESTS Conference and the 6th International Joint Meeting.
2025
Europe and a new platform
Data transfer agreement with the ESTS Database, migration to the new REDCap platform and the first Spanish units eligible for ESTS certification.
2026
New processes, first results
ReSECT Thymus is rolled out and the first manuscript — neoadjuvant chemoimmunotherapy in resected stage III NSCLC — arrives.
2026
Data science, professionalised
ReSECT takes its data science capability beyond volunteer effort: a formal agreement with the Aragón Technological Institute (ITA) puts dedicated expertise behind the registry and opens the way to AI tools for its users.
Take part
Your next case can be
someone else's evidence
Pre-registration takes a couple of minutes. If your department meets the requirements of the internal regulation, you can also apply to lead a project on registry data.
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