Chest
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The Internet has fundamentally transformed the way patients and health-care providers communicate and interact. The use of digital tools and social media platforms, such as blogs, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, have empowered patients to expand their health-care knowledge and have provided practitioners with new ways to gain knowledge, lead discussions, promote causes, and build relationships with patients and other providers. In this article, we discuss the difference between digital communication, static one-way digital presence, and two-way social media connections. We also describe ways to establish and foster your digital profile, review the benefits and risks of engaging professionally in social media, and describe ways in which digital and social media tools may prove useful in both reimbursement and practice management.
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The current approaches for tissue diagnosis of a solitary pulmonary nodule are transthoracic needle aspiration, guided bronchoscopy, or surgical resection. The choice of procedure is driven by patient and radiographic factors, risks, and benefits. We describe a new approach to the diagnosis of a solitary pulmonary nodule, namely bronchoscopic transparenchymal nodule access (BTPNA). ⋯ We describe a new approach to accessing lesions in the lung parenchyma. BTPNA allows bronchoscopic creation of a direct path with a sheath placed in proximity to the target, creating the potential to deliver biopsy tools within a lesion to acquire tissue. The technology appears safe. Further experiments are needed to assess the diagnostic yield of this procedure in animals and, if promising, to assess this technology in humans.