- Lung cancer kills more patients
than prostate cancer, breast cancer and colon cancer combined.
Just in 2022,
more than 130,000 people
will lose their life to lung cancer.
- When lung cancer is caught early
it's much easier to treat in a curative way.
So lung cancer can present silently when early,
so patients don’t have symptoms that would alarm us
or alert us that lung cancer may be present.
Which is why screening is very important in the high risk population.
- The way we do that is with getting an annual low-dose CT scan
and so people who smoked one pack per day for 20 years
or a half pack a day for 40 years and over the age of 50
should get an annual CT scan for screening.
- So if a patient, for example, has an abnormal finding on their CAT scan,
a patient may be referred to us to have a bronchoscopy done.
Through a bronchoscopy, we’re able to sample tissue in the lung
and diagnosed abnormalities of the lung.
- A bronchoscopy is a procedure that you get with general anesthesia.
- It's a long, thin, flexible tube
on one end of that has a camera
and the other and is manually held by the operator.
- So when we think about pursuing these nodules bronchoscopically,
we have a new technology called robotic bronchoscopy.
- You again have a flexible, thin, long tube with a camera on one end.
However, the other end is attached to a robotic arm
and then you, as an pulmonologist or as an operator, you operate that robotic arm.
- The biggest airway that you have is your trachea.
That's your main windpipe
and as you branch to the lower parts of the lung,
the airways get smaller and smaller
and, traditionally with our regular bronchoscope,
we can maybe only make it out to about
20 to 30% of the airway that we can see
just because the size starts to get too small.
With robotic bronchoscopy, we can get up to 90 to 95% or more.
It also provides a lot more stability
and so when we're bypassing a nodule or lesion,
we don't have to worry about our hands
holding the correct in the exact position while we're bypassing,
the robot can do that for us.
- The yield of the biopsies that we do with robotic bronchoscopy
is much greater than traditional bronchoscopy.
When a biopsy is done of a lung nodule,
we have no further information about the involvement of the lymph nodes,
which ultimately is very important when we think about treatment options.
Endobronchial Ultrasound or EBUS
allows us to look at things that are not directly inside the airways.
So, for example, the lymph nodes in the chest.
- So just like our bronchoscope is a thin tube that goes down into the lung to get biopsies,
the EBUS scope or endobronchial ultrasound scope
has an ultrasound at the end of that bronchoscope
and it allows us to see the lymph nodes that are outside the airway but right next to it
and we can actually watch a needle go directly into the lymph node to get a biopsy sample of that.
- The advantage of doing both the robotic bronchoscopy and the EBUS at the same time
is we get the most amount of information
in order to accurately diagnose and stage the lung cancer
with a low risk and all done within one procedure.
- You're going to come and you're going to get your cancer diagnosed
and staged in one anesthesia setting
and that allows us to get you to the specialists
that's going to be able to treat your cancer much quicker
and increase the chances that you're going to be cured of your disease.
- The whole treatment plan can take under a month.
In the grand scheme of things, that's lightning fast.
- We are a very high volume center,
so if you need a lung cancer treatment or a lung cancer surgery,
you want to go to a place which has done this hundreds and thousands of times
not ten times
which is really important for patient outcomes.
And on top of that,
we are the only accredited cancer center in the state of Connecticut.
You will also have access to all the latest
research trials and clinical trials to take care of the lung cancer patients.
You will get an access to the world-class thoracic oncology program,
which has all the resources that you need to get an excellent care
for your lung cancer.