Each year, more than 4000 Kentuckians are diagnosed with lung cancer.

Those who receive a diagnosis often have to wait for several weeks before they can undergo surgery.

But a new treatment approach being used at the University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center, is sparing patients the weight and the anxiety that comes with it.

Details in today's medical news.

Everyone, as soon as you hear you have a lung nodule, the first fear is, oh my God, I have lung cancer, I'm going to die.

And that's what everyone thinks.

So that first phase where you're not sure what it is and you don't know what's happening, that's really distressing for folks.

They don't have any idea, you know, are they going to make it to their kids graduation in a couple of months?

What about the vacation they have planned?

So if we can get them to the point where we have a diagnosis, that's great.

But then that wait between diagnosis and treatment, knowing that there's a cancer in your body and you've got like this ticking time bomb in there that's horrible for patients.

My nurse practitioner had told me, since I was a long time smoker, that they offered a free lung scan and I had the I took them up on it.

I had the free lung scan done and it came back and it showed something, but they didn't know what.

I went back three months later and it looked a little more suspicious.

There were no symptoms and a lot of times people wait for symptoms to go to the doctor.

We know that lung cancer is everywhere in Kentucky.

Everyone knows someone who's had lung cancer, and most people know someone who died of lung cancer.

And part of the reason that we see so much of it, and that it's so deadly, is that we don't catch it early.

So for a patient with an early stage lung cancer, that can mean months from the time they first get a scan to when it's actually been treated.

And what happens during that time is that cancer can spread.

What we want to do is get to it faster once we know there's something there.

How can we figure out what it is and treat it at the same time?

And we do that by combining two different technologies, and we can get one of them to take a look down the airways from the inside, get a little piece of it and tell us what it is.

And then if it's cancer at the same time, we can use the other one to make a couple of small incisions in the side and go in and take out that part of the lung where this cancer is.

And that gives folks the best chance of surviving.

And by doing that, all in one anesthesia, one hospital stay, we get you from diagnosis to treatment much faster.

You stand longer at the grocery store than you do to have this lung scan.

That's a very simple test.

And, it saved my life.

The cancer center began same day lung cancer procedures in February.

The center has treated six patients so far and expects to treat 3 to 4 patients each month.