Lung biopsies are excised from patients and then sent to the laboratory for advanced cancer testing. These tests require that all patients have an adequate amount of high-quality tissue (e.g. with live cancer cells) to be able to conduct the advanced tests such as EGFR, kRas, or PD-1/PDL-1.
Intra-procedurally, he only way to truly assess tissue adequacy is to interrogate /image the biopsy in it’s entirety, to determine 1) do I have the tissue? 2) what exactly am I looking at (cancer cells, immune cells, granuloma)? and 3) do I have enough cells to submit to pathology to gain the best chance of a conclusive diagnosis?