Bowling Green hospital uses new technology to find lung cancer

By Heather Close Published March 4, 2024 FEATURED, YOUR HEALTH

Kentucky Health News

The Medical Center at Bowling Green has established “a fast-track clinic that will help in the fight against lung cancer and give patients a better chance of surviving it,” Ann Marie Dotson reports for the Bowling Green Daily News.

“The goal of the program is to detect lung nodules at the earliest stages to either prevent serious issues before they occur or to treat concerns quickly by offering a variety of options tailored to a specific diagnosis,” Dotson writes, noting the it uses “a new technology that allows pulmonologists to biopsy smaller nodules.”

Jennifer Finch, director of clinical integration at Med Center Health, said the program can detect cancer at stage 1, where there is a survival rate of 70 to 80%. “Historically, on small lesions, we had to wait and watch to see if they grew, but this computer-assisted robotic guided program guides the doctors to the small nodule, allowing them to get it,” she told Dotson.

The hospital said it started the program because Kentucky has the highest rate of new lung-cancer cases across the country, Dotson reports. It’s a collaboration between its cardiothoracic surgeons, oncologists and Western Kentucky Heart and Lung board-certified pulmonologists.

“The team meets each Friday to view and discuss patients who may need further examination and review reports of patients who have incidental lung nodules and those detected through low-dose CT scans, working directly with the patient’s primary care providers,” Dotson reports. “Eligible patients are then scheduled for consultations with the program’s team of physicians.”

Finch told Dotson, “As a team, we review the patient’s history, whether the patient is a smoker, family history and cancer risk to see if the nodule could be benign or cancerous.”

Then the team devises a treatment plan “based on the patient’s needs, including further testing, surgery, diagnostic imaging, chemotherapy, radiation therapy or a biopsy.” Finch said since the program opened Dec. 8, “we have had fantastic outcomes already.”

She added, “This program is really personal for me, and I have such a passion for it because my father died of lung cancer.” Kentucky leads the nation in lung cancer and deaths from it.