How I do it: CT pulmonary angiography.
OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this article is to describe the techniques to improve motion artifacts, vascular enhancement, flow artifacts, body habitus image noise, vascular opacification in parenchymal lung disease, streak artifacts, and the indeterminate CT pulmonary angiogram. In addition, this article will illustrate the diagnostic criteria of acute and chronic pulmonary emboli.


CONCLUSIONS
Pulmonary embolism is the third most common acute cardiovascular disease, after myocardial infarction and stroke, and it leads to thousands of deaths each year because it often goes undetected. For the more than 25 years that the direct signs of pulmonary embolism have been available to the radiologist on CT, this noninvasive technique has produced a paradigm shift that has raised the standard of care for patients with this disease.
Wittram
Conrad
C
Department of Thoracic Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Founders 202, 55 Fruit St., Boston, MA 02114, USA.
D000208:Acute Disease; D000792:Angiography / Q000379:methods*; D002908:Chronic Disease; D006801:Humans; D011651:Pulmonary Artery / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D011655:Pulmonary Embolism / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D011787:Quality of Health Care; D014057:Tomography, X-Ray Computed / Q000379:methods*