Living Well With Lung Cancer
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Imaging tests. They can help see if any of the tissues in your organs don't look normal. You may get a CT scan, which is a powerful X-ray that makes detailed pictures inside your body. Or you might need an MRI, which uses powerful magnets and radio waves to make pictures of organs and tissues.
If you do have cancer and start treatment, imaging tests can also help your doctor learn how well your treatment is working.
Biopsy. Your doctor takes a small sample of tissue from the organ where he thinks you may have cancer. For example, he may remove a polyp or growth from your colon, or use a small needle to remove tissue from your breast.
A doctor called a pathologist will look at it under a microscope to see if there are cancer cells. A biopsy can also show if they are just in that one organ, have spread from another place in your body, or how much they've grown.