- [Doug] I was hoping you wouldn't ask that question
I've been smoking probably 55 years.
I quit in January when they found the nodule in my lung.
(upbeat music)
- [Dr. Pritchett] Lung cancer is the largest cancer killer
in the United States
it kills more people than
colon, breast and pancreatic cancer combined.
- [Dr. Herrera] It is a challenge
to diagnose these patients early
despite all the technologies to date.
- [Dr. Pritchett] 75% of patients are found
when they're at stage three or four
where we can't do a surgery to cure them.
We need something that changes the status quo
something that we can get out
to smaller lesions with confidence
and safely biopsy them.
That's where robotics comes into play.
(upbeat music continues)
- [Patient] I thought you would be good today.
- [Dr. Pritchett] I am
I'm gonna give you the good stuff
and we're gonna knock you out cold.
- [Patient] You ain't giving me no barbecue.
(both laughing)
- [Dr. Pritchett] We have a lot of lung cancer here
in North Carolina in general.
I kind of call it the tobacco belt.
We find out people have lung cancer
in a variety of ways in terms of detecting it
but ultimately all of these patients
to establish a diagnosis of lung cancer
need to have a biopsy.
That means we go in by whatever method
and we actually just take a piece of tissue,
get some cells, give them to the pathologist
and see if those are cancer or not.
The most invasive option
to get a biopsy of the lung
is a surgical biopsy.
- [Dr. Herrera] Sometimes a biopsy is accurate the first time,
sometimes another method needs to be used.
Eventually if surgery is needed,
the surgeons get involved, the surgery is performed.
- [Dr. Pritchett] We try to avoid that
if we can help it
because it's a very invasive option
and not a lot of these patients can tolerate that.
- [Doug] I got a new doctor,
he knew that I smoked cigarettes.
"Why don't you quit?"
He talked me into having a CT scan
and it showed a little,
I guess you'd call it a nodule, in my lungs.
At that particular point
it was presumed that I had cancer.
(soft rock music)
They tried to do a biopsy
but could not get a decisive sample.
That led to the fact that
we were going to open me up
and get a sample surgically,
which I didn't want to do.
- [Dr. Pritchett] Doug's case was incredibly difficult.
They said that
they were going to have to do an open thoracotomy
where they basically cut you between the ribs
from front to back.
A lot of patients have
permanent nerve damage and pain
months or even years after that.
- [Dr. Herrera] When the nodule is a little bit deeper
or you cannot feel it, it poses a challenge
because now it's hard to get a diagnosis
from the surgical field
or we have to remove
a large part of the lung to get that diagnosis.
- [Dr. Pritchett] So this is the crazy location
that it was in, right there.
This is the aorta,
this is the pulmonary artery
and it's so deep in the lungs
you can't really get a needle biopsy.
It was a little bit intimidating
to see the lesion in such a position.
So I said, "I'm gonna try the robot."
Ion is a minimally invasive robotic platform
that allows me to take this steerable catheter
and go far out into the periphery of the lung
where most of these lung cancers are.
I can angle it up to 180 degrees
and see where I'm going at all times with the camera.
It's almost like a roadmap
and I can just steer
and take a left turn and a right turn
and then I also have GPS built in.
So it's like driving to somebody's house
with Google Maps
and you just follow the directions
right to the lesion.
In Doug's case I was able to make something
that was incredibly difficult looking, very easy.
It took just a few minutes
with the Ion robot to get in that position
and it held itself in that position
for all the biopsies that I needed.
If Doug would have had that surgery
his recovery would have been long
and slow and may have actually been incomplete.
He likely would have been
in the hospital for four or five days.
It would have been weeks
before he was able to even lift
anything as heavy as a carton of milk.
With our procedure he went home the same day.
What we're trying to do is create this stage shift
where we catch patients at a much earlier stage.
Look what we've done with prostate cancer, for example.
We've made leaps and bounds
in terms of survivability of that disease.
We have to have a reliable way
that we can confidently biopsy these things
and not only rule in cancer
but in some areas, rule out cancer.
- [Dr. Herrera] Since 2007 I've performed
over 1300 robotic assisted surgeries
and over 600 of these have been for lung cancer.
When we saw Ion
we saw an opportunity to get
to those nodules that are deeper
or hard to reach or hard to find in surgery.
So we can get a diagnosis
to decrease the chance
that we're doing a major surgery
for a non-malignant case.
(soft rock music)
- [Doug] So far I had 38 radiation treatments
and eight chemo treatments.
Now I'm on immunotherapy.
If I had come in off the street
and they did not know that I'd had lung cancer
the technician that read my latest CT scan
would have given me a clear bill of health.
And of course I was tickled over that,
the wife and I both were.
It's just been a blessing.
- [Dr. Pritchett] We can talk about tools
and technology and robots,
but at the end of the day
what we have to keep our eye on
is that this is about people.
I think a shift is coming for lung cancer,
it's long overdue.
The Ion system represents a first step.
This is the beginning
but it's an exciting beginning.
(upbeat music)
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