Two-phase radial endobronchial ultrasound bronchoscopy registration.

Purpose: Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer death. This has brought about a critical need for managing peripheral regions of interest (ROIs) in the lungs, be it for cancer diagnosis, staging, or treatment. The state-of-the-art approach for assessing peripheral ROIs involves bronchoscopy.

Efficient procedure planning for comprehensive lymph node staging bronchoscopy.

For a patient at risk of having lung cancer, accurate disease staging is vital as it dictates disease prognosis and treatment. Accurate staging requires a comprehensive sampling of lymph nodes within the chest via bronchoscopy. Unfortunately, physicians are generally unable to plan and perform sufficiently comprehensive procedures to ensure accurate disease staging.

Image-guided EBUS bronchoscopy system for lung-cancer staging.

The staging of the central-chest lymph nodes is a major step in the management of lung-cancer patients. For this purpose, the physician uses a device that integrates videobronchoscopy and an endobronchial ultrasound (EBUS) probe. To biopsy a lymph node, the physician first uses videobronchoscopy to navigate through the airways and then invokes EBUS to localize and biopsy the node.