A Review of the Role of Thoracic Imaging in Clinical Practice  in a Tertiary Care Centre in Eastern India

Authors

Runa Das1 , Debabani Biswas2 , Aniruddha Ghosh3 , Amitava Paul4 , Debabrata Moitra5

HRCT thorax, discordant clinico-radiological diagnosis, ILD, Consolidation

Background: The wide availability of Computed tomography (CT) imaging facility in recent years, even

in district or sub-district level, has demanded proper evaluation of the trend of its utilisation and assessment

of benefit in diagnosis of different diseases. Material & methods: It is a retrospective analytic study of CT

thorax images along with its medical records in a tertiary care hospital in sub-urban locality of a metropolitan

city over a period of one year. Minitab software (version 15.1.0.0) used for statistical analysis. Result:

226 CT thorax images reviewed; 71% referred from pulmonary Medicine department and mostly from

Pulmonary Medicine out-patient department (60.6%). Overall, the final diagnosis obtained with CT imaging

remained unaltered in 62.8% of cases. However, among those with discordant radiological diagnosis,

normal CT images were the most common finding (29.8%); infective aetiology was the most common pre

test provisional diagnosis among these patients. Conclusion: CT imaging is immensely helpful for critical

decision making regarding management. However, it should be utilised more judiciously specially when

dealing with suspected pulmonary infections, especially in resource constrained set-up.