Erik Vakil

Current research and plan: Optimizing the diagnostic and staging pathway for patients with suspected lung cancer. Current project is in collaboration with MD Anderson Cancer Center using decision analysis methodology to estimate the risks, costs, and cumulative time to diagnosis/staging between different bronchoscopic strategies (conventional bronchoscopy, peripheral endobronchial ultrasound, electromagnetic navigational bronchoscopy), emerging bronchoscopic strategies (robotic bronchoscopy) and established strategies (CT-guided-biopsy, surgery). This project is expected to be hypothesis generating. The goal is to evaluate potential pathways in patients referred to the Alberta Thoracic Oncology Program. This will be a multi-step project using retrospective analyses to establish baseline data then prospectively evaluate different strategies. My previous research includes but is not limited to: the role of bronchoscopy in the evaluation of immunocompromised patients with viral respiratory tract infections, the diagnostic utility and safety of outpatient local anesthetic single-port thoracoscopy for the evaluation of patients with exudative pleural effusions and high pre-test probability of malignancy, safety of propafol in outpatient thoracoscopy, and the value of intra-operative rapid onsite evaluation of touch preperations to improve intra-operative diagnostic accurary in patients who are candidates for slerosant-based pleurodesis during outpatient thoracoscopy.