Twenty years ago, Sutter Health Mills-Peninsula Medical Center became the first hospital in the Bay Area to offer early lung cancer detection.
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Fast forward to today: a new way to fight the country's deadliest cancer.
"The Ion brings us back to the forefront of lung cancer care and gives us all the tools that we need to best diagnose and treat patients," said Sutter Health Pulmonary Disease Physician Dr. Alexander Zider.
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Developed by Sunnyvale-based Intuitive Surgical, the Ion robot can help doctors diagnose lung cancer faster and safer than ever before.
"The robot helps with the navigation out to where we're going and tries to get us in the right spot," Zider said. "Then we use additional tools to confirm we're in the right spot and biopsy the spot and try to get an answer."
Zider took controls of the robot to show us how it can perform a lung cancer diagnostic procedure, known as a bronchoscopy.
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"This tool allows us to safely biopsy many nodules that we would not be able to currently biopsy," Zider said. "It allows us to safely biopsy other nodules that could lead to higher risk of complications with other methods. And it allows us to find out, if patients have cancer, where it is at the time of the procedure as well."
Instead of using a large needle through the ribs to see into the lungs like before, the robot goes down the throat and helps doctors navigate the lung's branches in a less-invasive way.
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"If you put a needle from the outside into the lung, the lung can collapse," Zider said. "It's like popping a balloon and that happens 5-15% of the time, depending on what the patient's lungs are like. When we biopsy from the inside, the risk of collapse is around 1%."
The Ion also allows doctors to biopsy places that were once too risky to reach.
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In the past, patients would have to wait until their condition got worse to get answers and start treatment, despite a study from the National Institutes of Health showing delaying care by even six weeks can decrease survival by up to 13%.
"We hope that decreasing the time that patients get treated for their lung cancer, more patients can get good outcomes," Zider said.
The Ion has already been used on three patients and doctors are looking forward to helping many more in the future.