Aim. This study aimed to assess the role of echocardiography as a diagnostic tool in evaluating syncope patients with normal versus abnormal electrocardiogram. Methods. We conducted a retrospective study of 468 patients who were admitted with syncope in 2011 at St. Joseph's Regional Medical Center, Paterson, NJ. Hospital records and patient charts, including initial emergency room history and p...

BACKGROUND Pericardial effusion cytology is believed by many to be of limited value, yet few studies have evaluated its diagnostic utility. OBJECTIVES To determine the diagnostic utility of cytologic analysis of pericardial effusion in dogs and to determine if consideration of additional data could improve the diagnostic yield. ANIMALS Two hundred and fifty-nine dogs with cytologic analysis...

AIM To evaluate the diagnostic yield of brush cytology for biliary strictures detected on ERCP when a systematic approach is used. PATIENTS AND METHODS Data on 62 consecutive patients with a biliary stricture on ERCP were collected. Cytological samples were processed immediately after brushing in the endoscopy room, and all were analyzed by the same pathologist. For the statistical analysis s...

BACKGROUND The objective of this study was to identify high-yield screening risk factors for detecting maternal non-medical drug use during pregnancy. METHODS A four year retrospective analysis was conducted at an academic medical center. Detailed chart review of both the newborn and mother's medical record was performed on all cases for which one or more drug(s) or metabolite(s) were identif...

Video capsule endoscopy (VCE) is a new noninvasive imaging technique for the complete small bowel. It provides good to excellent visualisation of the mucosa of the small bowel and has a high diagnostic yield in selected patients with gastrointestinal blood loss of suspected small bowel origin and in patients with Crohn's disease. In comparison with small bowel X-ray and push enteroscopy, diagno...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE CT is currently the method of choice for guiding biopsy of lesions of the spine. However, in our hospital, fluoroscopy-guided percutaneous biopsy has been preferred for several years because of equipment availability and easy craniocaudal angulation. The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of fluoroscopy-guided percutaneous biopsy in a clinical setting for diag...

Few data are available concerning the relationship between alveolar and blood cell populations during neutropenia. We wanted to compare the value of pulmonary endoscopic procedures with lavage in neutropenic (polymorphonuclear (PMN) count < or = 1,000.mm-3) and non-neutropenic settings. We therefore, retrospectively, reviewed the results of 118 investigations for pneumonia in patients with mali...

PURPOSE In a significant number of patients developing epilepsy in adult life, the aetiology of their seizures remains unclear. Antibodies directed against the voltage gated potassium channel complex (VGKC Ab) have been identified in various cohorts of patients with epilepsy, although the role of these antibodies in epilepsy pathogenesis is not fully known. METHOD We reviewed the notes of 144...

BACKGROUND Single balloon enteroscopy (SBE) is a recently developed diagnostic modality to assess small bowel mucosa. The data on learning curve of SBE is scanty. We aimed to assess the learning curve, diagnostic yield and safety of SBE. METHODS All patients who underwent SBE at our centre from December 2007 to December 2010 were included retrospectively. The clinical details, enteroscopy fin...