Veterans receiving care at the Orlando VA Medical Center now have access to robotic bronchoscopy, an advanced procedure that helps clinicians reach and biopsy hard-to-access lung nodules with greater precision. “Robotic bronchoscopy is the new addition to our regular bronchoscopies,” said Dr. Nazia Sultana, Section Chief of Pulmonary & Critical Care. “Bronchoscopy is a procedure where we go down with a camera into the windpipe, go to the area of concern, and attempt to biopsy from there.”
Using the ION robotic bronchoscopy platform, Orlando VA’s highly trained pulmonary team plans the procedure using CT imaging and software that creates a navigation map through the airways.
“It’s basically a GPS system,” Sultana said. “We have an abnormal CT that shows a lung nodule. We make a CD of that, put it into the software, and the software maps out the path. It literally tells us which windpipes to go to reach this location.”…