According to the NHS, about 48,000 people are diagnosed with lung cancer every year in the UK.
It is also responsible for about 35,000 deaths each year.
Greater Manchester has a significantly higher number of people diagnosed with lung cancer than the national average.
Patients diagnosed at the earliest stage of lung cancer are nearly 20 times more likely to survive for five years than those who receive later diagnoses.
The new Ion probe allows clinicians to detect “abnormalities that we wouldn’t have been able to sample with the technology we had before,” said consultant Dr Chris Craig.
The team at Wythenshawe had “hit the ground running”, with a “100% success rate in terms of reaching a diagnosis”, he added.
Dr Craig said they were hoping to “accelerate the programme quite significantly”, with a long-term ambition of using the probe on up to 35 patients a week.
