UPMC Williamsport Hospital has upgraded its lung cancer screening with a robotic device that speeds up diagnosis.
Approved only six years ago, ion robotic bronchoscopy can go deeper into patients’ lungs to find cancerous masses, said Dr. Ganga Ranasuriya, a UPMC pulmonologist.
“It's not a robot performing the procedure. It's an additional tool that helps us with navigating to these spots in the lung. It's like an extra image, like an extra computer screen,” she said.
UPMC Williamsport joins a growing list of hospitals statewide offering the tool to help diagnose lung cancer. For example, Commonwealth Health hospitals began using the technology in November 2022, Lehigh Valley Health Network more than a year ago and Geisinger Health System in March.
Intuitive Surgical, a California-based biotechnology company, developed the tool, which the Food and Drug Administration approved in 2018. UPMC Williamsport began using the tool about a month ago, but other UPMC hospitals, including in Pittsburgh, began using it earlier, cardiologist Dr. Syed Yazdani said.
The device includes a 3.5 mm-wide catheter and a fiber-optic camera that a pulmonologist can insert into lungs. Practitioners can view about 120 degrees in any direction, according to Intuitive Surgical.
Practitioners watch two screens to see inside patients. When potentially cancerous masses show up, a needle is passed through the catheter for biopsies (tissue/cell removal), according to Intuitive Solutions. The tissue is then sent to a lab for testing. Previously, doctors relied on CAT scans to find lesions and waited for them to grow before doing a biopsy., according to Intuitive.
“We are doing biopsies to diagnose patients' lung cancers and other conditions. The main benefit for us would be to diagnose these tumors and lung cancers earlier, rather than waiting till they get larger but (with) potential spread to lymph nodes and things as well,” she said. “It's replacing the old technology. A majority of the places are now implementing this technology because it's very precise, you can diagnose cancers at an early stage and you can improve survival.”
Only a few patients have undergone the new procedure at UPMC Williamsport so far. Dr. Ranasuriya said she performed it on six people while Dr. Yazdani conducted a couple himself.
“The instrument - the robot - when we are resecting it (surgically removing), we cannot feel the lesions which we want to resect. The reason why we use Ion is to mark it, and the way we do it, is that just before the procedure, we do a bronchoscopy to clear up the air with and then guide this ion thing very close to the lesion,” Dr. Ranasuriya said.
The system is also used just before surgery. It can inject a fluorescent dye into a cancerous lesion.
“After marking it accurately with this, we're able to see very clearly where the lesion is, so we don't have to feel it with our fingers, and we can just easily resect it,” Dr. Yazdani said. “Over the last two years, Ion by Intuitive has become the more popular choice of robotic bronchoscopy platform.”
November is lung cancer awareness month. Lung cancer kills more people than any other cancer, accounting for one in five cancer deaths, according to the American Cancer Society. About 125,000 lung cancer related deaths occur yearly, according to society data. More than 65,000 are men and more than 59,000 are women.
More than 234,000 new lung cancer cases - about 116,000 men and about 118,000 women - are diagnosed annually, according to the society. The average person diagnosed is 70 years old. Because of this, lung cancer screenings typically happen in smokers ages 50 to 80, Ranasuriya said.
Black men are 16% more likely to develop cancer than white men, but incidences of lung cancer are 16% lower in Black women than white women.
Lung cancer makes up 58.2 percent of cancer cases in Pennsylvania, higher than the national average of 53.6 percent, according to 2023 American Lung Association data. New cases have dropped as rates improved 16% in the past five years, according to association data.
“The guidelines for lung cancer screening is for patients who have a history of smoking the equivalent of one pack of cigarettes a day for at least 20 years or more,” she said. “Even if they have quit smoking in the last 15 years, they still qualify for that duration of smoking that they may have done in the past.”
Doctors urge smokers and former smokers to get screened even if they quit. CAT scan-screening is still used annually.
“They (patients) can get a lung cancer screening scan annually which is a low dose of radiation, non-contrast, no IV, no diet and a very simple outpatient procedure,” Dr. Ranasuriya said. “It takes a couple of minutes to do that, takes pictures of the patient's lungs and that would help monitor the patient's lungs annually to ensure that there are no new developing spots or nodules that could be potential cancers which allows us to find these cancers early on.”
Visit UPMC Hillman Cancer Center for more information.
