Recent advances in interventional cardiology, pharmacotherapeutics and modern surgical management in tertiary cardiac care centers have tremendously improved the present treatment of Pulmonary Embolism (PE). CT pulmonary angiography (CTPA), nuclear lung scan (V/Q scan), D-dimer test and modern echocardiography have revolutionized the diagnostic methodology and risk assessment criteria. Cardioge...

OBJECTIVE Massive pulmonary embolism is relatively rare but a potentially life-threatening condition. The purpose of this study was to analyse the outcome of pulmonary embolectomy in registered data from the Japanese Society of Pulmonary Embolism Research (JaSPER). METHODS From 1994 to 2006, 1661 cases of acute pulmonary embolism were registered in the JaSPER database. Retrospective analysis ...

No single non invasive test has sufficient diagnostic accuracy to be used alone for diagnosing or ruling out pulmonary embolism. Therefore, modern diagnostic strategies for pulmonary embolism rely on combinations of non invasive tests such as plasma D-dimer measurement, lower limb venous compression ultrasonography, ventilation-perfusion lung scan and/or spiral CT, the results of which should b...

The incidence of pulmonary embolism and the number of clinically missed diagnoses of it in necropsies carried out between 1960 and 1984 at this department were investigated. Pulmonary embolism primarily affects elderly people with serious underlying disease; in this study it was found more often in women. The incidence of pulmonary embolism (9% of all necropsies) was unchanged during the period...

BACKGROUND The diagnosis of pulmonary embolism demands flexible decision models, both for the presence of clinical confounders and for the variability of local diagnostic resources. As Bayesian networks fully meet this requirement, Bayes Pulmonary embolism Assisted Diagnosis (BayPAD), a probabilistic expert systems focused on pulmonary embolism, was developed. METHODS To quantitatively valida...

The aim was to establish the prevalence of pulmonary embolism in 21 children (median age 12 months; range 5-132 months) with central venous lines in situ > 3 months (median 10 months; range 3-47). Twelve-lead electrocardiograms (ECGs) and echocardiograms were analysed in a retrospective study using ECG and echocardiographic criteria for pulmonary embolism-previously established and validated in...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to determine the prognostic significance of right ventricular dilation on CT pulmonary angiogram in acute pulmonary embolism and to distinguish if this feature predicts mortality independently of the Pulmonary Embolism Severity Index, an established admission severity score. METHODS A retrospective study of patients admitted with pulmonary embolism confirm...

OBJECTIVES We examined the incidence of pulmonary embolism after cardiac surgery. BACKGROUND Because venous thromboembolism is considered to be an uncommon complication after cardiac surgery, its incidence was documented in a consecutive series of 1,033 patients who underwent cardiac surgery over a 5-year period. METHODS Parallel cohorts of patients in a tertiary referral center were evalua...

BACKGROUND Diagnosing pulmonary embolism may be difficult, because there is no reliable noninvasive imaging method. We compared a new noninvasive method, gadolinium-enhanced pulmonary magnetic resonance angiography, with standard pulmonary angiography for diagnosing pulmonary embolism. METHODS A total of 30 consecutive patients with suspected pulmonary embolism underwent both standard pulmona...