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GPS-like device navigates the lungs to locate potentially cancerous lesions
Doctors navigate the lung’s dark passages with new magnetic positioning device
BY DENNY ANGELLE
Unlike other cancers (colon, prostate, breast) lung cancer has no screening test, so early detection of the disease is crucial.
Lost? Today’s intrepid explorers just flip on their global positioning system (GPS) tracker and bounce their location off a satellite high above the planet. Within seconds, their pinpointed position is blinking on an amazingly detailed map.
This nifty bit of technology is yet another bit of fantasy swiped from the pages of science fiction and turned into a real-world tool for techno-fanatics. But now, imagine: shrink yourself to microscopic levels and use GPS-like tracking to navigate through the human body, like Raquel Welchand her fellow scientists did in the 1966 movie “Fantastic Voyage.”
Now, instead of miniaturizing yourself, picture a tiny probe guided by a physician, searching for lesions in the dark corners of the human lung guided by electromagnetic navigation like GPS.
The captain of this real-world voyage is Dr. William Lunn, chief of Pulmonary Services at The Methodist Hospital and an assistant professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. He uses a tool called navigational bronchoscopy to travel to the distant regions of the lungs and find tiny lesions that could be cancerous or malignant.
“It’s a system that enables us to see far beyond where we can visualize with our current scopes,” he says. The inReach System, approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in the United States in 2006, has just been installed at The Methodist Hospital.
Lunn says the system takes the guesswork out of identifying potentially cancerous lesions in the lung. Often it is difficult to obtain a good biopsy from a small lesion, so surgeons have to remove it completely.
“For patients who are not good surgery candidates due to their age or other conditions, the new system is a blessing,” Lunn continues. “For a small, potentially treatable lesion we can go in and take a good biopsy and use radiofrequency ablation or ultrasound to kill it off and not affect much healthy tissue surrounding it.”
It helps make earlier diagnosis and treatment of cancer possible and allows patients to avoid more invasive techniques that could cause complications. This system creates a 3-D road map of the lungs by using computerized tomography (CT) images to pinpoint trouble spots for physicians. The technology was originally developed to give the Israeli military the ability to place a ballistic missile into the breakfast bowl of its enemies; a company in Israel adapted the same concepts for medical use. Once the patient has had the CT of the suspicious spot in the lung, he or she lays on a special blanket that creates a magnetic field around the patient’s body. The physician uses a probe to locate known points in the body, and once six of those landmarks are located, the computerized system draws an amazingly detailed map for the physician. “Instead of sending our location into space, we send it to the computer,which pinpoints our trouble spot to the millimeter,” Lunn says.
