VIDEO: Drastic change in diagnostic tools determine stage of lung cancer

Editor’s note: This is a previously posted video, and the below is an automatically generated transcript to be used for informational purposes. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

Over the last couple of decades, they've changed dramatically. Before it was a camera very similar to if you've ever gotten a colonoscopy, long black tube with a camera, and that was able to let me evaluate about maybe 1% of the airway. I mean, in a normal height human being, you have thousands of meters of airway.

And then about 15 years ago, we came out with technologies that helped you integrate the bronchoscope, which is the camera and CAT scans, and helped guide us out using a specialized catheter, and that was called electronavigational bronchoscopy.

Well, in the last two to three years, there's a new form of bronchoscopic evaluation called robotic bronch, and what these are, it adds navigational bronch, in other words, a very high-resolution CAT scan with a very good navigational system. Imagine you're trying to drive to a new location. You put that spot on your Google Maps and it tells you to turn left, turn right, stop, you're there. It's very similar to that, but it also takes out any type of human shake in my hand or error in that, in the fact that when you go out into the lung, let's say I'm looking for a nodule that is one centimeter. Well, if you're breathing, which is not a bad thing for a person to do, and you're going up and down two centimeters, well boy, that could be kind of hard to hit. Well, the robot helps me adjust to that and really make the biopsy way more accurate.

Historically, what you're kind of talking about when you have a one to two centimeter nodule, we'll say about 60% of the time. Now what we're finding is we're in around 90% of the time, we're able to tell you what that nodule is made of. So, to evaluate a nodule, we use now at City of Hope, robotic bronchoscopy, and we use a technology that's been around since I think about '06, '07 in the United States called ultrasound bronchoscopy. That's where I'm able to look between the lungs and look at those lymph nodes that would be a part of staging and that, they're both very safe procedures. The complication rates are 6% or less, and they're a same day procedure. You get somebody to drive you in, takes me total, if I put the two together about two hours, and then you get to drive home later that day.