Evidence map›Paper›PMID 42444921›Full record

ArticleJournal of thoracic disease2026

A novel technique using diode laser-assisted endobronchial ultrasound-guided transbronchial biopsy: a brief report.

Ashish Jain, Jonathan Munoz, Anthony Vaccarello, Elio Feghali, Khaled Abdullah, Tarek Dammad

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Journal of thoracic disease, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.

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0cells of the map it votes in
0citing papers in PubMed
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1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

0 citing papers in PubMed.

No citing paper in PubMed yet.

4 · The record

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PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

6 authors.

Ashish JainDepartment of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Houston Methodist Hospital, Houston, TX, USA.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9962-8791
Jonathan MunozDepartment of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Houston Methodist Hospital, Houston, TX, USA.
Anthony VaccarelloDepartment of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Houston Methodist Hospital, Houston, TX, USA.
Elio FeghaliDepartment of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Houston Methodist Hospital, Houston, TX, USA.
Khaled AbdullahDepartment of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Houston Methodist Hospital, Houston, TX, USA.
Tarek DammadDepartment of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Houston Methodist Hospital, Houston, TX, USA.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Endobronchial ultrasound-guided transbronchial needle aspiration (EBUS-TBNA) remains the standard minimally invasive approach for diagnosing and staging thoracic pathology, yet needle aspiration alone often yields limited sensitivity and insufficient tissue for molecular profiling, and while forceps and cryobiopsy techniques can improve diagnostic yield, advancing conventional instruments to a target lesion is not always technically feasible. We report our institutional experience using a 1,470 nm diode laser as an adjunct to EBUS-guided transbronchial tissue acquisition to overcome these access limitations and enhance diagnostic yield. We performed a single-center retrospective case series of patients undergoing laser-assisted EBUS-guided transbronchial cryobiopsy (LA-EBUS-TBCB) or forceps biopsy (LA-EBUS-TBFB) following Institutional Review Board approval, with collected variables including patient demographics, procedural indications, lesion characteristics, laser parameters, diagnostic adequacy, and complications; reporting followed the Preferred Reporting of Case Series in Surgery (PROCESS) 2023 guidelines. Forty-seven patients (mean age 63.9 years; 53.1% male) underwent laser-assisted EBUS-guided biopsy using forceps, cryoprobe, or both, predominantly for diagnostic purposes (87.2%), with lymph node sampling performed in 76.5% of cases, most frequently targeting station 7 (40.4%) and station 4R (31.9%). All procedures used a 1,470 nm diode laser, most commonly at 1-watt power (63.8%). Diagnostic adequacy on pathology review was achieved in 93.6% of cases (44/47), compared with 85.1% (40/47) by cytology alone, an absolute improvement of 8.5 percentage points that recovered definitive tissue diagnoses in 4 of 7 otherwise non-diagnostic cases, and no laser-related bleeding, bronchospasm, airway injury, or fire events occurred. These findings suggest that laser-assisted EBUS-guided transbronchial biopsy using a 1,470 nm diode laser is safe and technically feasible, with high diagnostic adequacy and a favorable complication profile, and may help overcome access limitations encountered with conventional instrumentation, though larger prospective studies are warranted to validate these results, optimize procedural parameters, and define its role relative to standard EBUS-TBNA techniques.

Indexed as

cryobiopsydiode laserendobronchial ultrasound (EBUS)Lung cancertransbronchial biopsy

Identifiers

PMID42444921
PMCPMC13358764

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Registered trials

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.