• Radiology · Mar 1992

    Traumatic aortic tear: screening with chest CT.

    • V Raptopoulos, R G Sheiman, D A Phillips, A Davidoff, and W E Silva.
    • Department of Radiology, University of Massachusetts Medical Center, Worcester.
    • Radiology. 1992 Mar 1; 182 (3): 667-73.

    AbstractDynamic chest computed tomography (CT) was performed in 326 patients who had undergone abdominal CT for blunt trauma to evaluate the role of chest CT in screening for thoracic aortic injury. Evidence of mediastinal bleeding constituted an abnormal CT examination. The results were correlated with those from aortography in 131 patients. The chest radiographs were abnormal in 127 patients (39%). Of those 127 patients, chest CT scans were abnormal in 39 patients; an aortic tear was present in eight of those patients (21%). The remaining 88 patients had normal CT scans and no aortic injury. Of the 199 patients with normal radiographs, 15 had abnormal CT scans and 184 had normal CT scans and no aortic injury. There were no false-negative CT scans; 79% of patients with normal CT scans had false-positive chest radiographs. With CT there was a significant improvement over plain radiography in specificity, accuracy, and predictive value of positive results. If chest CT were used as an adjunct to chest radiography in the screening for traumatic aortic tear, the need for aortography would decrease by 56%. Chest CT can safely help discriminate candidates for aortography, is cost-effective, and, in hemodynamically stable patients, should be incorporated in the screening for traumatic aortic tear.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…