OU Health Debuts New Robot Used For Minimally Invasive Lung Biopsies

OU Health’s Stephenson Cancer Center has the first robot in the state that can now do minimally invasive biopsies on patients that have lung nodules.

The new ION robot allows doctors to reach areas in the lung they never could before to get the most accurate biopsy.

"The catheter is much thinner, the stability is there and that has led to the accuracy, which is much higher than the other navigational platforms," Dr. Fawad Chaudry said.

OU doctors said prior to this robot, physicians missed up to 40% of the time when they tried to reach certain nodules in the lungs, which led to inaccurate results.

"Many of these patients, we find small nodules, less than a centimeter, meaning less than a half an inch," Dr. Matthew Reinersman said.

The new ION robot allows doctors to put the CT scan into the machine and within minutes they can come up with the plan to navigate and guide the robot to the nodule in the lung.

"And if it is cancer, we can take care of it early and we know that the number one way to cure lung cancer is to find it early and to treat it definitively early and to take it out with the minimally invasive ION,” Reinersman said.