BATON ROUGE - November is Lung Cancer Awareness Month, and with it has come remarkable stories about people battling the disease and ways technology has improved detection.

On Wednesday, in front of the Louisiana State Capitol, WBRZ got the chance to meet Chris Hebert, a Louisiana man battling stage four lung cancer. He was diagnosed back in 2021.

"The doctor basically gave about nine to 12 months to live, based on what the treatments that were available here in Louisiana," Hebert said.

On Wednesday, Chris celebrated both his 50th birthday and four years since the diagnosis, showing extraordinary resilience.

"Every moment is precious. Every second is precious. The fact that we can wake up and breathe this morning here in America and celebrate survivorship," Hebert said.

Chris credits both doctors and the advancement of technology for why many people are getting lung cancer detected earlier, which leads to earlier treatment and better chances of survival.

One of those pieces of technology is a robot at Ochsner Health in Baton Rouge.

"We currently have the Ion robotic platform that we're using for robotic bronchoscopies in our clinical space," Ochnser Pulmonologist Dr. Alexander Mulamula said.

The procedure involves a tube entering a patient through their mouth or nose. They are asleep for it, and the procedure usually takes around an hour.

"It allows us to navigate to very distant distal areas that we previously could not reach safely in patients, and be able to obtain biopsies," Mulamula said.

According to Oschner, traditional lung biopsy methods can have a complication rate of 25% This new robot method reduces that to around 2%.

The machine comes with a little joystick-like ball that drives the robot into the patient, and also has a live monitor that allows the doctors to see where the tube is.

"The difference from the traditional bronchoscopies is that you're actually truly seeing where you're going, so you're not going blind. The traditional bronchoscopy only goes into the first, maybe second-order airways; this is going into the third-order airways," Mulamula said.

Dr. Mulamula says the robot has been very successful since its inception. They pointed to the fact that the previous week, a patient came in for the procedure. This past Monday, the medical team already had their biopsy results.