“The biggest challenge is that survival rates are very poor. Most people with advanced-stage disease when they are diagnosed, the chances of [them] surviving five years is around five percent.
“Besides smoking cessation, which is very important, the only other way to make a real massive change, a paradigm shift, in survival is to make the diagnosis early – because if you catch it really early, with small lesions, small spots inside the lung, then you push up the chances of survival massively; it goes up to 55 percent plus.
“LungVision basically reconstructs 3D images from a CT scan the patient has had and brings it to the operating room. And allows us to visualise the 3D image without the need for an intraoperative CT scan. “The lung itself is a very complex structure. Just imagine that there are 15 or 16 branches of a tree and each dividing several times themselves. When you go to the smaller branches, called terminal bronchioles, you have thousands of them, so it’s very easy to get lost.”