New Robot to Help Improve Lung Cancer Diagnosis

A new tool at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore is taking a closer look inside your body to hopefully find danger sooner.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of all cancer deaths nationwide, and women are one-and-a-half times more likely to get diagnosed with lung cancer than men.

According to Sy Sarkar, M.D., a board-certified interventional pulmonologist with The Lung Center at Mercy and director of interventional pulmonary services leading Interventional Pulmonology at Mercy, the new Galaxy Robot System by Noah Medical performs bronchoscopies to enhance the early identification of lung cancer. With the robot, they can reach potentially cancerous nodules and lesions in the lungs with far greater precision and accuracy than in the past.

"We're not even operating manually anymore. We use an Xbox controller just like our kids do, and we play a video game, and that allows us to take the camera and light into the peripheral of the lung, very hard-to-reach locations, tight turns, and we can get to 95% of the areas of the lung that we couldn't before," Dr. Sarkar said.

The procedure is minimally invasive. It's mostly performed on an outpatient basis. Mercy is the first hospital in Maryland and one of only 25 medical centers in the nation to offer the Galaxy Robot for lung patients.

View Mercy interventional pulmonologist Dr. Sy Sarkar’s interview regarding robotic bronchoscopy.