Chest
Clinical InvestigationsCan Portable Chest X-ray Examination Accurately Diagnose Lung Consolidation After Major Abdominal Surgery?: A Comparison With Computed Tomography Scan
Section snippets
Subjects
Nineteen consecutive patients (Table 1) were enrolled in this study which had been approved by the Ethics Committee of our institution. All patients were scheduled for elective aortic replacement. Apart from one patient, the population studied was composed of male subjects who were all active or former smokers. Five of them had a FEV1 <60 percent of predicted values. None had preoperative resting hypercarbia. No significant thoracic abnormalities were present on the reference standard
Results
The results are summarized in Tables 2 and 3.
Discussion
The main finding of this study was that in an unselected surgical population undergoing major abdominal surgery, x-ray films were characterized by poor sensitivity but good specificity for the detection of lung consolidation, especially in basal zones. Interestingly, the total amount of densities assessed by CT scan were correlated to postoperative PaO2, but not to the change in lung volume.
The conventional x-ray film examination remains the traditional and always available method for assessing
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Mrs. Gillian Debrabander for her help in editing the manuscript.
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Manuscript received December 16, 1991; revision accepted April 22.