General description of procedure, equipment, technique CT-guided thermal ablation of lung tumors has emerged during the past ten years as a method to be considered in the local treatment of lung cancer and in management of patients with limited pulmonary metastatic disease. Three techniques are currently available for thermal ablation in the chest, each of…
General description of procedure, equipment, technique In some patients with intrathoracic fluid collections, the use of sonography, computerized tomography (CT), or fluoroscopy to guide percutaneous placement of small-bore drainage catheters allows for a less invasive alternative to “blind” or “convention” large-bore chest tube placement or surgical management. Sonography is typically used to characterize pleural fluid…
General description of procedure, equipment, technique Image-guided transthoracic needle biopsy (TNB) involves the percutaneous placement of biopsy needles into intrathoracic lesions under CT, sonographic, or fluoroscopic guidance for the purpose of establishing a pathologic or microbiologic diagnosis. The majority of image-guided TNB is performed using CT guidance, which allows accurate needle placement into smaller (<…
General description of procedure, equipment, technique Current CT technology utilizes multi-detector helical acquisition to image the chest. Multi-detector CT generates thin-section CT images with excellent spatial and temporal resolution. Using the latest detector arrays of 256 or 320 detector rows, the entire chest can be scanned in two or three seconds. Images obtained during intravenous…
General description of procedure, equipment, technique Dual-energy subtraction (DES) radiography is a recently developed technique that incorporates both standard, high-energy and low energy (i.e., bone) images as part of a routine chest radiographic examination. DES offers two principal advantages over conventional digital chest radiography. By providing a bone image at low kVp (low energy), calcified…
General description of procedure, equipment, technique As currently performed, conventional chest radiography employs digital x-ray receptors that are embedded in radiographic cassettes. This digital technology has replaced the traditional film-screen systems used previously. Digital radiography units convert x-ray photons into an electrical charge in one of two ways: directly, using an x-ray photoconductor and thin-film…
