Why have so many people been diagnosed with pulmonary nodules in the past two years?
Currently, there are 150 million high-risk groups for pulmonary nodules in my country, and 10 to 20 million patients with pulmonary nodules are newly discovered or diagnosed every year. Early screening of pulmonary nodules is also the most common problem in clinical practice. In the past two years, many people have also discovered when doing CT scans that the proportion of pulmonary nodules found in themselves and those around them has also increased.
Why is there such a situation? Let’s watch the reporter’s exclusive interview with Academician Zhong Nanshan.
Zhong Nanshan, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering: There are two situations. The first is due to the new coronavirus. Many people have symptoms such as fever, cold, cough, etc., and many people do CT. The number of people doing CT has increased a lot. We now pay more attention to pulmonary nodules in physical examinations. Pulmonary nodules are of course a manifestation of early lung cancer, so more people are doing it.
Second, in fact, ordinary people and adults have large and small nodules. This situation is quite common. We made a statistics and found that about 30% to 40% of normal people have nodules of different sizes, ranging from two to three millimeters to one centimeter. This is very common. If we add artificial intelligence to CT, artificial intelligence can automatically distinguish large and small nodules. It is done using artificial intelligence methods, and 60% of them have nodules.
Zhong Nanshan: Pay attention to early screening of pulmonary nodules but don’t panic too much
Academician Zhong Nanshan reminded that most nodules are benign, but the concern about pulmonary nodules cannot be ignored. It is more necessary to use scientific and effective diagnostic methods to improve public awareness and achieve "early diagnosis and early treatment" .
Zhong Nanshan, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering: I personally think that the current public attention to nodules is a good thing. It can help discover a small number of patients with lung cancer, but I am afraid there is no need to be overly concerned.
Especially now that CT is more accurate and can identify benign nodules, it can be left alone or continued long-term observation. The most commonly used method now is to use AI artificial intelligence to analyze various aspects of the nodule, its density, its edges and its size. It requires attention from the medical side, and the public also needs to pay attention. We must disseminate knowledge to the public earlier and avoid causing excessive panic. This is very important.
In recent years, our country has vigorously promoted cancer prevention and treatment and established the "Cancer Prevention and Control Action" among the 15 special actions of the "Healthy China Action". At the end of last year, multiple national departments jointly issued the "Healthy China Action-Cancer Prevention and Treatment Action Implementation Plan", which set the main goals of enhancing cancer screening and early diagnosis and treatment capabilities, standardizing diagnosis and treatment levels, and controlling the disease burden on patients. Driven by a series of policies, lung cancer screening, diagnosis and treatment have also made clear progress.
Zhong Nanshan, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering: We are now cooperating with some countries to further improve the specificity and sensitivity of lung cancer diagnosis. The current directions are CT, AI, and biomarkers in blood. So far, we have achieved relatively good results, and the accuracy rate can now reach 93%. We are working on simplifying the method. The starting point is high-precision and cutting-edge ideas, but the goal is to be simple, cheap, effective, and safe, so that it can be used by the grassroots, and greatly improve the cure rate of malignant tumors that are the most harmful and serious to the people.
