BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery is preferred over conventional methods, such as pleural biopsy, in the diagnosis and treatment of patients with pleural effusion. Considering that Imam Khomeini Hospital is facing a large volume of patients with pleural effusion of unknown origin referred from other centers, the present study was conducted to investigate the role of...

BACKGROUND Tuberculous pleural effusion occurs in 30% of patients with tuberculosis (TB). Rapid diagnosis of a tuberculous pleural effusion would greatly facilitate the management of many patients. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) has been used to detect Mycobacterium tuberculosis in pleural fluid with highly variable sensitivity. OBJECTIVE To improve our laboratory diagnosis of tuberculous pl...

Minimally invasive investigations, such as pleural fluid cytological assessment and closed percutaneous pleural biopsy, are often performed first in the investigation of suspected malignant pleural effusions. Malignant pleural effusions can be diagnosed with pleural fluid cytology alone in most cases; however, closed pleural biopsy is performed to increase the diagnostic yield when pleural flui...

The diagnosis of bronchopulmonary carcinoma was either corroborated or arrived at in 13 out of a total of 26 cases by pleural biopsy. Taken as a whole, pleural biopsy is inferior to repeated examination of the pleural exudate for neoplastic cells. In individual observations, however, the former can be found positive at a time when neither the pleural fluid nor any other material provide a diagn...

BACKGROUND Blind percutaneous pleural biopsy has traditionally been performed to investigate the etiology of exudative pleural effusion in which the initial thoracocentesis has been non- diagnostic. In view of the increasing use of image-guided and thoracoscopic pleural biopsies, this study examined the role of blind Abrams pleural biopsy in the investigation of the exudative pleural effusion i...

The objective of the present study is to evaluate the use of pleural fluid ADA, cytology, pleural biopsy and Mantoux test in the diagnosis of tuberculous pleural effusion. This prospective study was conducted on 92 patients December 2011– October 2013 at Government Chest Diseases and Tuberculosis Hospital, Hanamkonda. Diagnostic accuracy of pleural fluid cytology (L/N ratio >0.75) , ADA >40 U/L...

BACKGROUND Some trials recently demonstrated the benefit of targeted treatment for malignant disease; therefore, adequate tissues are needed to detect the targeted gene. Pleural biopsy using flex-rigid pleuroscopy and pleural effusion cell block analysis are both useful for diagnosis of malignancy and obtaining adequate samples. The purpose of our study was to compare the diagnostic utility bet...