ASCO 2025: Investigating Lung Cancer Diagnosis Rates in the Mississippi Delta

Raymond Osarogiagbon, MD, of the Baptist Cancer Center, joined Lung Cancers Today at the 2025 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting to share insights from his presentation on lung cancer diagnosis rates from lung cancer screenings and the organization’s incidental pulmonary nodule program in the Mississippi Delta.

In the second segment of his interview, Dr. Osarogiagbon discussed the impact of the lung cancer screening program on diagnosis rates within the Baptist Cancer Center community healthcare system in locations across the Mississippi Delta.

“The critical thing that we did that I think has made a big difference was that we were very careful to construct the plan for collecting the data and analyzing it to be able to understand how we were doing,” he said.

Dr. Osarogiagbon explained that creating infrastructure for data collection early into the research process allowed the investigators to track important information such as patient screenings, which patients were coming in, and the outcomes of those appointments. He also described patient populations heavily represented in the study.

“The Baptist Memorial Healthcare Corporation is a faith-based not-for-profit community healthcare system that has institutions across Mississippi, West Tennessee, and Eastern Arkansas, but serves about 150 counties across six states, including parts of Kentucky, Missouri, and Alabama,” he said. “These are very diverse populations, lots of rurality, with very diverse socioeconomics and cultural populations. For example, in our cohort, about 20-30% of people who live in rural counties who typically struggle to gain access to care, 15% are either uninsured or underinsured, and about 30% of the population is African American.”

Dr. Osarogiagbon also highlighted the difference between the lung cancer screening program and the incidental nodule program. Unlike the screening program, which prospectively identifies patients who meet certain eligibility criteria for screening, testing, and interpretation, the incidental nodule program helps patients who have already received tests that show pulmonary abnormalities.

“We created this automated process to capture reports, and then we have a team that uses guidelines to triage patients into pathways of care based on risk,” he explained. “That’s what has yielded this 3:1, almost 4:1 lung cancer diagnosis [ratio]. We have a rich data set now in the nodule program, and we have over 50,000 people enrolled. In the screening program, we have about 20,000 people enrolled. In the nodule program, we have about 3,000 people diagnosed with lung cancer already, and in the screening program, we have about 700.”

These findings helped Dr. Osarogiagbon and his team refine the organization’s screening criteria to ensure that all patients across Baptist Community Healthcare Systems in the Mississippi Delta had improved access to screening and diagnostic care for lung cancer.

“We learned that the lung cancer screening criteria that we used, which are based on the National Lung Screening Trial, exclude over half of the people who eventually get diagnosed with lung cancer,” he concluded. “There’s a lot of work that still needs to be done to modify them and make them more faithful to the true at-risk populations, work that allows us to improve the efficiency of the diagnosis of lung cancer.”