Bronchoscopy is a treatment that allows doctors to take a look at your lungs and airway. It’s normally executed by a medical professional that concentrates on lung conditions, a pulmonologist. Throughout rigid bronchoscopy, a thin tube, bronchoscope, is traveled through your nose or mouth down your throat and into your lungs.
Bronchoscopy is most frequently carried out utilizing an adaptable bronchoscope. Nonetheless, in specific situations, for example, if there’s a lot of bleeding in the lungs of an individual or a large object got stuck in the airway, an inflexible bronchoscope may be required.
Usual reasons for requiring bronchoscopy are a consistent cough, infection, or something uncommon seen on a breast X-ray or other tests.
Bronchoscopy can also be made to acquire samples of mucus or tissue to eliminate foreign bodies or various other clogs from the respiratory tracts or lungs, or to provide treatment for lung issues.
Why it’s done
Bronchoscopy is typically done to discover the root cause of lung trouble. For instance, your doctor might refer you for bronchoscopy due to the fact that you have a relentless cough or an unusual upper body X-ray.
Reasons for doing bronchoscopy consist of:
- A medical diagnosis of a lung trouble
- Recognition of a lung infection
- Biopsy of tissue from the lung
- Removal of mucus, a foreign body, or various other obstruction in the airways or lungs, such as a tumor
- The positioning of a tiny tube to hold open an air passage
- Treatment of lung trouble, interventional bronchoscopies, such as bleeding, an uncommon narrowing of the air passage (stricture) or a flattened lung (pneumothorax).
Throughout some procedures, special tools may be traveled through the bronchoscope, such as a device to acquire a biopsy, an electrocautery probe to manage bleeding or a laser to lower the dimension of an airway tumor. Special methods are utilized to assist the collection of biopsies in ensuring the desired area of the lung is experienced.
In individuals with lung cancers, a bronchoscope with a built-in ultrasound probe may be used to check the lymph nodes in the breast. This is called endobronchial ultrasound (EBUS) and helps physicians establish the appropriate treatment. EBUS may be utilized for other sorts of cancers to figure out if the cancer cells have spread out.
