At present lung cancer is the most common cancer in the world and responsible for over 1 million deaths worldwide. Advances in bronchoscopy have helped to increase detection rates of central type early lung cancer. These lesions are invisible on the basis of radiological methods. They usually show only subtle changes of the bronchial mucosa and are therefore sometimes difficult to identify by conventional bronchoscopy.
The data showing the ability to increase the diagnostic rate for early lung cancer in the central airways by autofluorescence bronchoscopy are convincing. Video-chip-autofluorescence bronchoscopy seems to be one of the technologies with the largest impact on diagnostic bronchoscopy in the last decades.