UK St. Claire has joined more than 40 hospitals across the state in the use of a new cancer diagnosis machine to help combat eastern Kentucky’s high lung cancer rates. For the last couple of months, doctors at UK St. Claire have been using the new Ion machine to find cancer nodes after a CT screening -without having to create incisions. Doctors can then biopsy the node and derive a treatment plan.
Gary Bunch, Chief Medical Officer at UK St. Claire, said the machine’s ability to find nodes has quickened the treatment process greatly.
“The lung branching is almost like an upside down tree. So, you go down one big branch and then it branches and branches and branches. And this Ion device actually will show the doctor by arrow which hole - which branch - to go into so you can actually get to the biopsy,” Bunch said. “When you get there, a little green ball shows up and you know you're there. It's crazy, right?”
Bunch said with technology they have now and the direction it’s headed, the biggest issue is people not coming in for screenings. He said smokers who are not going to give up the habit should at least get a screening so the cancerous nodes can be found as early as possible and be treated.
“The fear should be of the cancer and those consequences because these surgeries are pretty easy to do these days. We can get those lung cancers out, get you home in a day,” said Bunch.
Dr. Zachary Fyffe said before the Ion machine it could take five months from the first positive CT scan to the beginning of the treatment plan – that’s no longer the case. He said he recently had a patient that had 2A and was growing close to a 3A sized node.
“And from the time that I caught it to the time that she had the biopsy, the diagnosis, and the oncology appointment it was seven days from start to finish. And that time frame may go from a curable stage 2 lung cancer versus a stage 3, which is very difficult to treat,” said Fyffe.
Fyffe said the difference between stage two and stage three for this patient was 1 centimeter and the Ion machine’s early detection made all the difference.
“Going from that 1 centimeter in growth would not only change the time until she would need surgery- the reason that lung cancer is curable at smaller stages is that surgery is the staple of that… The difference in between that is, she may not have been able to have surgery right away,” said Fyffe.
On top of the Ion machine UK St. Claire has begun to offer other new services in recent months, hiring a plethora of new doctors and experts while maintaining focus on communicating with patients and their loved ones multiple times a day.
Officials said the hospital is focused on obtaining another machine called the Da Vinci - a robot doctors control to perform the cancer surgery.
Fyffe said using the machine could quicken the process even further.
“You can get the biopsy, dye the lung in real time, transfer them to the OR and they can get diagnosis and the mainstay of treatment, which is the surgery, and go home in 24 hours. You have to have a chest tube in place to make sure that the lung re-expands and if the lung re-expands in 24 hours, you go home, pull it out and you go home,” said Fyffe.
Jake McCoy is the Pragmatic Development Representative over eastern Kentucky for Intuitive Surgical, the company that built and provides the Ion Machine and Da Vinci Machine. He said the technology is a step in the right direction.
“The Ion Robotic Bronchoscopy is a tool that is now available to physicians to achieve that early-stage diagnosis,” McCoy said.
McCoy said the reason the five-year survival rate of lung cancer in the region remains so abysmal is again caused by method of diagnosis and detection.
“If we’re not able to increase our overall lung cancer screening and establish programs that enable early detection of these cancers- that’s kind of the big problem,” said McCoy.
Officials hope to continue to raise survival rates as more advancements are made in technology and the community is made more aware of the importance of screenings.
More information on UK St. Claire their recent advancements and the Ion machine is available on their website.