Bronchoscopy

Bronchoscopy is a test used to look inside your lungs. After giving you medicine to make you sleepy, the doctor puts a flexible scope down your nose or mouth into your lungs. Through the scope the doctor can:

• See where in your lungs any bleeding is coming from

• Get samples of mucus to check for infection

• Take a small piece of tissue to check for cancer

• Remove a foreign body from your lungs

Bronchoscopy

To view the airways directly, a doctor passes a flexible bronchoscope through a person's nostril and down into the airways. The area in the pink circle shows what the doctor sees.

Flexible Bronchoscopy: Inserti...

video

Before the procedure you're given medicines to relax you or sometimes put you to sleep. For your safety, you shouldn't eat for at least 6 hours before the bronchoscopy.

• Doctors spray a numbing medicine in your throat

• Doctors thread the small flexible tube through your nose or mouth and into your lungs

Doctors can do several procedures during a bronchoscopy, such as:

• Push salt water into your lung and then suction it back out to look for infection or cancer cells

• Take a biopsy (a sample of tissue to look at under a microscope) with forceps or a needle that's passed through the scope

After bronchoscopy, doctors will watch you for 2 to 4 hours until you're fully awake. If they did a biopsy, you'll usually have a chest x-ray to make sure you didn't develop any problems, such as a collapsed lung.

Doctors use a bronchoscopy to look for problems such as:

• Bleeding in the lungs

• Lung cancer

• Lung damage from breathing in smoke

• A foreign body that you choked on, such as a peanut