the relationship between reduction in PET scan avidity (SUVmax) in mediastinal nodes and the presence of persistent N2 disease after induction therapy as a means to provide an additional tool for risk stratifying prospective surgical patients.Dr. Martin and Mehran expressed concern that our publication appears to advocate for the use of serial PET scanning to establish persistence of nodal disease as the sole determination of operability. This was not the intention of the article. We simply wanted to show that assessing the postinduction metabolic activities of the tumor and mediastinal nodes may help surgeons modify their management strategy to more appropriately fit their patient's risk profile.It was also noted that our paper was done in an era where endobronchial ultrasound (EBUS) was not routinely used prior to induction therapy. As mentioned in the limitations of the article, we recognized that the vast majority of the cohort studied had preinduction mediastinoscopy, whereas the recent trend is towards the use of EBUS. Using EBUS in this setting would allow for the use of mediastinoscopy following induction therapy, theoretically removing the significant hazards and false negative rate of a redo mediastinoscopy. However, the data on the role that EBUS plays in the postinduction setting are scant. The initial results appear slightly better than the 25% false negative rate of repeat mediastinoscopy, but the number of studies is limited and it still needs be determined whether or not these results hold up when they include less cautiously selected patients and centers.Since postinduction primary mediastinoscopy performs well in comparison to primary mediastinoscopy in general, we agree that in an ideal world, EBUS should be the initial choice in preinduction lymph node staging. Yet, this requires important forethought when patients undergo initial evaluation and staging, something that is often disregarded. Moreover, since EBUS is both operator dependent and still not universally available nationwide, we feel a non-invasive staging modality such as PET scanning could provide a gap for those institutions (1,2).Dr. Martin and Mehran queried as to why not operate regardless of nodal status, if patients who underwent resection while not achieving mediastinal downstaging still revealed substantially better survival rates than those seen with definitive chemotherapy. This is an important question, as the utility of observing PET scan avidity lie not only in the ability to downstage patients, but the capacity to accurately upstage patients with stage IIIa NSCLC as well.We acknowledge that many centers have adopted an approach that favors resection regardless of persistent N2 or downstaged N2 disease; however, this is not our methodology. If a patient has histologically proven single station or non-bulky multistation IIIa N2 disease, it is our preference to offer induction chemotherapy and surgical