Loading...
The respiratory doctor said 800 times that patients with pulmonary nodules should not do this examination, at least half of the diagnosis is missed!
A few days ago, a patient with pulmonary nodules came to the outpatient clinic, and after reading her CT report, I suggested that she should not be treated with traditional Chinese medicine anymore, what is going on?
I read her report and CT film, which showed that there was a pulmonary nodule of 18mm in the upper lobe of the left lung, burrs, and pleural traction, which were all bad indications, and the possibility of malignant pulmonary nodules was preliminarily judged.
Ask the patient, such a large nodule, has it not been found in the previous physical examination? It wasn't until later that I learned that this patient had done chest X-rays in previous years, and only this year did a CT of the lungs.
After listening to the patient's words, my heart was mixed. Clinically, there are many patients like this. I found that there are many people who do not know that it is not easy to find lung nodules on chest X-ray, and there are also many patients who do the wrong examination and the small nodules are not found.
Why do chest x-rays miss small nodules?
In general, small nodules in the lungs, especially those less than 1 cm, are generally difficult to find on chest x-ray, which is mainly determined by the imaging principle of chest x-ray. Because chest x-ray is a two-dimensional image, it cannot provide the exact location of the nodule in three-dimensional space and its relationship to adjacent blood vessels, bronchial tubes, and other structures.
Therefore, usually the image presented by the chest x-ray is the image of various parts of the chest overlapping each other, just like a photograph, it is easy to cover some structures with each other and miss the lesion.
Even if a few small nodules are found, it is difficult to clearly show the edges, density, and internal structure of the nodules.
Therefore, as a respiratory physician with more than 50 years of clinical practice, I often tell my patients not to do chest X-ray examination for lung nodules, but generally use CT to check, and the accuracy rate will be higher, because CT can well show the structure and morphology of lung nodules, and for pulmonary nodules, early detection and early treatment can also be achieved! If you have a report that you can't understand, or have respiratory questions, you can find a professional doctor to answer your questions!