Reply to: "Digging mediastinal holes in vigor: a word of caution".

We thank T.K. Tournoy and the co-worker for their thoughtful letter in response to our manuscript on transbronchial mediastinal cryobiopsy [1]. We agree that our study shows no differences in the diagnostic yield of lung cancer between endobronchial ultrasound-guided transbronchial needle aspiration (EBUS-TBNA) and mediastinal cryobiopsy, thus it would be premature to consider mediastinal cryobiopsy as the standard nodal staging strategy in lung cancer. In our cohort, a diagnosis of non-small cell lung cancer is established by EBUS-TBNA but not cryobiopsy in 3 patients, which might be attributed to the relatively fixed biopsy location of mediastinal cryobiopsy. Nevertheless, it should be noted that there were 6 lung cancer cases only diagnosed by mediastinal cryobiopsy. Footnotes This manuscript has recently been accepted for publication in the European Respiratory Journal . It is published here in its accepted form prior to copyediting and typesetting by our production team. After these production processes are complete and the authors have approved the resulting proofs, the article will move to the latest issue of the ERJ online. Please open or download the PDF to view this article. Conflict of interest: Dr. Zhang has nothing to disclose. Conflict of interest: Dr. Huang has nothing to disclose. Conflict of interest: Dr. Herth reports personal fees from Pulmonx, Erbe, Olympus, and Uptake, outside the submitted work. Conflict of interest: Dr. Fan has nothing to disclose.