Novel electromagnetic targeting system for navigating surgery in endobronchoscopy

Nowadays, lung cancer is one of common cancers around the world. To increase the survival rate of the patient, early diagnosis is necessary. To achieve this, bronchoscopists usually use endobronchial ultrasound for navigating surgery in endobronchoscopy. However, because the bronchoscopist has to continuously re-navigate/re-target the bronchoscope to collect specimens from the same tumor, the whole navigating/targeting process has to be repeated many times in one surgery. Due to this, navigating/targeting the bronchoscope to correct/same tumor is still a time-consuming process. Therefore, a more accurately tumor-targeting approach is needed to significantly save time in navigating surgery. To address this issue, recently researchers combined electromagnetic (magnetic-sensor-based) targeting technology with conventional endobronchial ultrasound as a hybrid targeting approach to achieve a more accurate realtime tumor-targeting in endobronchoscopy [1]. However, when comparing conventional bronchoscopes, the bronchoscope with magnetic sensor is more expensive and less compatible. Thus, a cheaper and compatible electromagnetic targeting technology is required. Recently, some researchers demonstrated electromagnetic-induction/magnetic-interaction approaches to target distal screw-hole in intramedullary interlocking-nail surgery [2]-[5]. We think that these targeting approaches can be modified to develop as a new, cheaper, and compatible electromagnetic targeting technology for general endobronchoscopy. Hence, in this paper, we demonstrate the electromagnetic targeting system for endobronchoscopy.