Journal of the American College of Radiology : JACR
-
To assess the prevalence of appropriate imaging among emergency department (ED) patients with low back pain. ⋯ The majority of patients presenting to the ED with low back pain did not undergo imaging. The vast majority of those who underwent imaging were appropriately imaged, based on the ACR Appropriateness Criteria.
-
The Quantitative Imaging Biomarker Alliance (QIBA) is a multidisciplinary consortium sponsored by the RSNA to define processes that enable the implementation and advancement of quantitative imaging methods described in a QIBA profile document that outlines the process to reliably and accurately measure imaging features. A QIBA profile includes factors such as technical (product-specific) standards, user activities, and relationship to a clinically meaningful metric, such as with nodule measurement in the course of CT screening for lung cancer. In this report, the authors describe how the QIBA approach is being applied to the measurement of small pulmonary nodules such as those found during low-dose CT-based lung cancer screening. ⋯ Through a process of experimentation, literature review, and assembly of expert opinion, the strongest evidence was used to define how to best implement each step in the imaging acquisition and evaluation process. This systematic approach to implementing a quantitative imaging biomarker with standardized specifications for image acquisition and postprocessing for a specific quantitative measurement of a pulmonary nodule results in consistent performance characteristics of the measurement (eg, bias and variance). Implementation of the QIBA small nodule profile may allow more efficient and effective clinical management of the diagnostic workup of individuals found to have suspicious pulmonary nodules in the course of lung cancer screening evaluation.
-
Multicenter Study
Does distance matter? Effect of having a dedicated CT scanner in the emergency department on completion of CT imaging and final patient disposition times.
To evaluate whether presence of a CT scanner in the emergency department (ED) improves ED workflow by decreasing time between imaging requisition and completion, and time to final patient disposition. ⋯ Presence of an ED CT scanner is associated with decreases in time to CT scan completion, radiologic interpretation, and patient disposition.
-
The aim of this study was to assess the effect of applying ACR Lung-RADS in a clinical CT lung screening program on the frequency of positive and false-negative findings. ⋯ The application of ACR Lung-RADS increased the positive predictive value in our CT lung screening cohort by a factor of 2.5, to 17.3%, without increasing the number of examinations with false-negative results.