PEMBROKE PINES, Fla. – New technology is helping specialists in the fight against lung cancer, the leading cause of cancer death among both men and women in the United States.
Memorial Cancer Institute is among the first in South Florida to begin using the Monarch Platform.
It combines robotic-assisted bronchoscopy software with standard endoscopy to better detect small and hard-to-reach nodules in the lung.
“The exciting part about this technology is we can use it in combination with a lot of our other advanced technologies to help figure out when patients have cancer how bad it is so we can make a diagnosis and get them to treatment very, very quickly,” said Dr. Mark Block, chief of the division of thoracic surgery.
In the future, he said the FDA-cleared technology may be used to actually provide treatment for lung cancer.
More than 90% of people diagnosed with lung cancer do not survive the disease because it’s usually at an advanced stage.
COVID test game-changer?
Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara have come up with what they call a potential game-changer for COVID-19 testing.
An app and a lab kit can turn your smartphone into a virus detection system, providing quick results at a fraction of the current cost of testing.
Researchers don’t have FDA clearance for the test yet but said they designed it with emergency use guidelines in mind.