The following Healthcast report by Channel 4 Action News medical editor Marilyn Brooks first aired Nov. 6, 2003, on Action News at 5 p.m.

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Technology plays a key role in diagnosing cancer in its early stages and saving thousands of lives every year. It's now used to diagnose other problems, and can save patients a trip to the operating room.

Annie Laura Burton: "Life was awful, because I never knew when this nausea and severe hurting was going to hit me."

Burton has lived with pain in her abdomen. Test after test failed. Then she had a procedure using endoscopic ultrasound, which revealed a serious problem.

Dr. Mohamad Eloubeidi: "Endoscopic ultrasound is really a marriage between endoscopy and high frequency ultrasound. It would allow them to image surrounding structures such as the media synum, the pancreas, the liver, the spleen."

Basically, the doctor's eyes and ears can go inside the patient to find cancers at an early stage. A retractable needle can biopsy a suspicious target. Pathologists are on site to analyze the sample for cancer cells.

Eloubeidi: "The patients feel like they got their question answered on the spot, so there is not a lot of uncertainty before they leave. They don't have to wait three to five days for the pathology to come back."

Burton did not have cancer, but the endoscope revealed tiny gallstones and pancreatitis -- a painful and sometimes deadly disease. The diagnosis was made without a trip to the operating room.

Eloubeidi: "We use it as a diagnostic tool and as a research tool in several other protocols, especially in pancreatic cancer. It makes us a referral center for these problems, and that's why yoiu do more of the same and you become more excellent at it every day."

Burton: "My health is fine. I'm back where i used to be."

Ultrasound technology has been around for years, but the picture quality is making it better than ever. Couple that with endoscopy, and you have a great way to look inside from the outside.