Robot-assisted bronchoscopy to discover and diagnose lung nodules is being used at Excela Latrobe Hospital https://www.excelahealth.org.
Auris Health’s MONARCH Platform is aiding Excela thoracic surgeons in viewing hard-to-reach areas of the lungs and obtaining tissue samples for biopsy of lung nodules.
Patients may have benign nodules within the airways as a result of infection, inflammation, and noncancerous tumors, or the nodules may be malignant. While advances in technology have had a significant impact on lung cancer management, there are still barriers to diagnosing and treating because of the difficulty of accessing certain regions of the lungs.
The MONARCH Platform reinvents the concept of a bronchoscope by leveraging the power of robotics and uses a novel telescoping design to reach deeper into the lung than conventional methods.
Each component of the bronchoscope can be independently articulated, advanced, retracted, and positionally locked, allowing physicians greater control and maneuverability deep in the lung where most small nodules are found.
While the physician is controlling the robotic system, a 3-D map of the patient’s lung is shown on a computer screen. This allows the physician to see exactly where the tube is in the person’s lung and where it needs to go in order to guide the physician to the nodule. Excela Latrobe hospital is one of only 165 hospitals out of about 5,000 hospitals in the U.S. to utilize the platform which was recently cleared by the FDA.
According to Michael Szwerc, MD, Medical Director of the Center for Lung, Esophageal and Thoracic Disorders at Excela Health, “Through the Advanced Lung Cancer screening program at Excela, we have performed more than 15,000 low dose CT scans in an effort to identify patients who are high risk for developing lung cancer.”