Soft Tissue Radiology

The article I wanted to summarize was monitoring and tracking the prognosis of patients with pulmonary contusion following chest trauma and the diagnosis that best to diagnosis the patients and their overall progress made after the diagnosis. The name of the article is “Risk Factors Affecting the Prognosis in Patients with Pulmonary Contusion Following Chest Trauma”. Considering that blunt trauma to the chest often results in pulmonary contusion this is a very relevant and important review of 16 separate cases. Pulmonary contusion is lung parenchyma; accumulation of blood and fluid develops in the alveolar spaces causing edema and disruption of normal lung structures and function. This may present with rib fractures, flail chest, hematomas with associated pneumothorax and hemathorax. During the review, 16 separate cases were looked at which involved blunt trauma cases with pulmonary contusion. All of which were diagnosed with chest x-rays and CT scans of thorax. Along with the radiology APACHE scores, SAPS II scores, SOFA scores and paO2/Fio2 ratios were also collected. Patients were monitored and tracked within the first 24 hours, in which 5 cases ended up dying while in the ICU. The other 11 survived. Two patients with coexisting head injuries and two patients having lower limb crush injuries and liver laceration respectively died of sepsis and one patient had a lung laceration with continuous bleeding. All of the subjects had similar injuries. There was an increase incidence of bleeding through the endotracheal tube, positive fluid balance in non-survivors versus in survivors but no difference was noted in with either crystalloid or colloid use. Pulmonary contusions occur in 30-75% of cases with blunt thoracic injury according to the study. This particular study showed mean age of survivors to be lesser than non-survivors which was significant in the outcome. There was also significance in daily fluid balance and ventilator days and the outcome...