An Observation Study of EBUS Procedures at Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Endobronchial ultrasound (EBUS) – guided transbronchial needle aspiration (TBNA) is the preferred modality for sampling mediastinal lymph nodes in the workup of lung cancer. Here, we report the demographics, complications, and diagnoses of 3516 patients who underwent EBUS between March 7th, 2021, and September 1st, 2024, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The diagnostic yield of EBUS was 85.6%. For patients who were not diagnosed by EBUS, 47% were non-diagnosed with other methods. The top final diagnoses were cancer, no malignancy, inflammation/infection disease at 46.4%, 36.1%, and 9.3%, respectively. The ratio between adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma was about 4:1. The mean duration of an EBUS procedure was about 58 minutes. There were 10 procedures with post-operative complications (0.28%). A total of 9298 lymph nodes were detected on computed tomography, EBUS was able to detect 9042 of them. The detectability of the node correlated with pathology, size, PET avidity, and station. In summary, EBUS achieved high diagnostic yield, and the overall complication was extremely low.