India's 1st VBN facility set up at AIIMS

New Delhi: The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) on Thursday said it has become the country's first hospital to set up Virtual Bronchoscopy Navigation (VBN), an advanced facility for diagnosis and treatment of patients with small tumour-like spots in the lungs, which can be cancerous.

"The Virtual Bronchoscopy Navigation system was installed in the Department of Pulmonary Medicine and Sleep Disorders at AIIMS, New Delhi, on April 23, 2018 and four initial patients underwent the procedure successfully," said Professor Anant Mohan.

"These small lung lesions can very commonly be lung cancer and if not diagnosed on time, they can increase in size and the cancer can spread to other body parts," he said.

It is difficult to make a definite diagnosis by seeing the appearance of these lesions on the CT scans or the chest X-rays and for that, an image-guided biopsy is needed in which a needle is used to puncture the chest wall to reach the spot, said AIIMS spokesperson Karan Madan.

The VBN system allows getting samples from these small lung lesions with extreme precision and safety using a bronchoscope after a 3-D view of the windpipe is generated using the CT scan images, thereby avoiding puncturing the lung and reducing complications, said Madan.