The prevalence and mortality rate of lung cancer are high. Comprehensive treatment with surgical involvement is the mainstream approach for treating early-stage lung cancer. Video-assisted thoracic surgery has been adopted as the standard minimally invasive surgical option in recent years. However, difficulties in distinguishing cancer tissue, localizing draining lymph node and identifying intersegmental planes make complete removal of cancer tissue challenging. In recent years, near-infrared fluorescence imaging has been integrated with video-assisted thoracic surgery and enjoys broad application prospects. Now it plays an important role in the localization of pulmonary nodules, marking of sentinel lymph nodes and discrimination of intersegmental planes during surgeries.

With the development of technology, the detection rate of ground-glass opacity (GGO) is rapidly increasing. GGO comprises of pure GGO and mixed GGO. Many researches have studied the characteristics of GGO, and they found that different malignant probability of GGO was associated with different image characteristics. It is obvious that there is a close relationship between the image characteristics of GGO and its prognosis. However, due to the various image characteristics of GGO, it is essential to assess the prognosis of lung adenocarcinoma patients in a more comprehensive way. In this review, we summarize the correlation between the main GGO image features (solid proportion, size, mean CT value, shape characteristics) and the prognosis of lung adenocarcinoma patients, to provide clinical reference for prognosis prediction and decision-making for patients with lung adenocarcinoma.