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Unsuspected pulmonary embolism on CT scanning: yet another headache for clinicians?

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr Sujal R Desai
Department of Radiology, King’s College Hospital, London SE5 9RS, UK; sujal.desai@kch.nhs.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Clinicians have long known that the symptoms and signs of pulmonary embolism are non-specific and that, unless the index of suspicion is reasonably high, the diagnosis is frequently overlooked. Against this background, clinically unsuspected pulmonary emboli are increasingly being spotted by radiologists on CT scans. Clinicians not only need to be aware of this, but also need to know how to deal with such serendipity. The quality of CT examinations has improved unimaginably; image acquisition, particularly with the new generations of multidetector CT (MDCT) machines, is now astonishingly fast and access to CT scanning has increased. The entire thorax can now be covered in a single breath-hold, and image degradation due to respiratory and cardiac motion is no longer a major issue. Furthermore, because of narrow collimation, images with exquisite spatial resolution are almost the norm and visualisation of opacified peripheral pulmonary arteries (down . . . [Full text of this article]

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