Sun City hospital hopes new technology aids lung cancer detection
Mar 28, 2019, 4:04 AM | Updated: 7:15 am
(Facebook photo)
(Facebook photo)
PHOENIX — A Sun City hospital is the first in Arizona to receive new technology that could help diagnose lung cancer earlier.
Banner Boswell Medical Hospital now offers the SuperDimension Navigation System, a “minimally invasive approach” that accesses difficult-to-reach areas of the lung, which could aid in identifying lung problems.
Lung cancer often isn’t identified in its early stages, so the technology will hopefully help cancer experts like Dr. Archan Shah, a Banner MD Anderson Cancer Center interventional pulmonologist at Banner Boswell, in early detection.
“With this navigational technology, we create a GPS system of the patient’s airways where the nodule is located, and that information is available in real-time during the procedure,” Shah said in a press release. “That helps fine-tune the exact location of this spot.”
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The technology uses a patient’s CT scan to “create a 3D virtual roadmap that allows doctors to navigate and steer a catheter quickly and accurately to reach pulmonary targets during a bronchoscopy.”
Once the target tissue is reached, physicians use the system’s specially designed brush – passed through an endoscopic catheter – to obtain tissue samples from endobronchial lesions, peripheral lung nodules, or lung masses, according to a press release.
Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer-related deaths and second-most common cancer in both men and women in the U.S.
About 234,000 Americans are diagnosed with lung cancer each year. The five-year survival for lung cancer is 19 percent.
Only eight other U.S. hospitals have the SuperDimension technology.
“Think of the GPS system you use in your car. Sometimes it says you’ve arrived at your destination, but you look around and think, ‘Well, I don’t quite see it,’” Shah said. “Then you realize, you have to go another 50 feet to the left, for example.
“This technology tells you exactly where you need to go, except we’re talking in millimeters instead of feet.”
