Clinics in chest medicine
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Clinics in chest medicine · Mar 2010
ReviewInterventional bronchoscopy from bench to bedside: new techniques for central and peripheral airway obstruction.
This article discusses how basic scientific concepts, based on a greater understanding of airway physiology, support the development and dissemination of multidimensional classification systems for tracheal stenosis, expiratory central airway collapse, and innovative interventional bronchoscopic procedures for patients with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
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Clinics in chest medicine · Mar 2010
Biography Historical ArticleBronchoscopy: the past, the present, and the future.
This article discusses bronchoscopy: its history, including development of instruments and techniques and important historical figures; current techniques and issues; and future possibilities and potential controversies.
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Virtual bronchoscopic navigation (VBN) is a method for the guidance of a bronchoscope to peripheral lesions using virtual bronchoscopy (VB) images of the bronchial path. Irrespective of the bronchoscopist's skill level, the bronchoscope can be readily guided to the target in a short time. A system to automatically search for the bronchial path to the target has been developed and clinically applied; this system produces VB images of the path to the fourth- to twelfth- (median, sixth-) generation bronchi, and displays the VB images simultaneously with real bronchoscopic images. In this article, the author discusses VBN and the automatic VBN system, reviews the published literature, and describes its usefulness and limitations.