Magnetic Bronchoscope for Improved Pulmonary Access

One of every 16 Americans will be diagnosed with lung cancer in their lifetime.

Each year in the United States there are nearly 250,000 new diagnoses and 150,000 deaths with an estimated productivity loss in excess of $20 billion.

Thanks to recent advancements in CT imaging, detection of smaller suspicious pulmonary nodules within distal regions of the lung is now possible. As a result, mortality rates have decreased by nearly 20% due to earlier initiation of treatment protocols. The ability to safely obtain a viable biopsy sample is critical.

However, despite the availability of better CT imaging, little progress has been made in expanding affordable tools which can safely access distal regions of the lung to diagnose and stage suspicious nodules.

Percutaneous needle biopsy remains the standard of care used to obtain nodule tissue samples, although the procedure is associated with pneumothorax complication rates greater than 20%. In contrast, bronchoscopes are 10X safer when used to acquire biopsies. However, bronchoscopes possess two main limitations which result in many lung cancers not being successfully diagnosed.

First, the relatively large size prevents them from being able to access most of the lung.

Second, because the bronchoscope?s tip is manipulated from nearly a meter away using complex pull-wire based mechanisms, limited control of the tip is provided which largely restricts biopsy to nodules within the airway.

To improve upon manual bronchoscopes, robotic solutions have been developed; however, these technologies are difficult to learn, do not greatly improve distal access or tip control, and are prohibitively expensive (~$500k) for most hospitals. As a result, adoption of robotics for bronchoscopy has been slow.

UNandUP has invented a novel robotic bronchoscopy platform that provides precise control of the bronchoscope?s tip using a smaller scope diameter than previously possible that enables safe access into otherwise inaccessible lung regions and the ability to better biopsy nodules not directly in the airway.

By overcoming the complexities of traditional robotic approaches, the proposed technology can be priced at a fraction of the cost of competing robotic solutions.

This will allow advanced lung biopsy capabilities to be offered to nearly all hospital versus only being available at select institutions.

Importantly, the technology also promises to serve as an exploratory platform for emerging cancer therapies which include gene, photodynamic, and ablation therapies.

The project?s aims include 1) building the robotic workstation, 2) building a steerable bronchoscope, and 3) assessing performance in CT-based bronchial phantoms.