Cold Saline Irrigation Before Endobronchial Biopsy

Patients undergoing an endobronchial ultrasound and biopsy can experience bleeding during the biopsy. These biopsies are read in real time by pathologists who travel to the endoscopy unit during the procedure. Often, when this happens, the blood contaminates the pathology slides making the slide unreadable. This then requires more biopsies to be performed, thus prolonging the procedure, and increasing anesthesia time. One innovative way to reduce bleeding may be to irrigate the bronchial wall with cold saline, where the biopsy is to be taken, immediately before biopsy, thus causing vasoconstriction and possibly resulting in less blood contamination on the biopsy slides. The current study will evaluate this prophylactic irrigation with saline to control bleeding, thus resulting in a quicker diagnostic result of the biopsies.