Margin index: a useful tool for the breast surgeon?

The Critical-Care Pain Observation Tool: A useful tool for pain assessment in intensive care units

Pain is a major concern in all intensive care units (ICUs). The proper assessment and management of pain is one of the main goals of patient care in ICUs. Improper evaluation of pain and its over or under treatment can cause significant problems in the process of patient management in ICU. Since most ICU patients are unable to communicate correctly with the ICU team and explain their level of p...

[Ankle-brachial index: a useful tool for stratifying cardiovascular risk].

All clinical guidelines on cardiovascular disease prevention recommend estimation of the overall individual risk as the basic tool to carry out an effective intervention. Unfortunately, the predictive power of risk equations and tables is not optimal, since many individuals who experience cardiovascular events are not identified as being at high-risk.1 For this reason, attempts have been made t...

Histogram analysis- a useful tool for tissue characterization in brain CT

Introduction: Pixel value in computed tomography (CT) gives the average linear attenuation coefficient of the scanned material in the path of the x-ray beam, being normalized to that of water. It is known that attenuation coefficient or HU value is a function of the chemical characteristic of the material and of the x-ray energy. The CT image shows the HU value by a shade of gr...

A Short Introduction to Clinical Photography for the Plastic Surgeon

Ultrasound Doppler renal resistive index: a useful tool for the management of the hypertensive patient

The Doppler-derived renal resistive index has been used for years in a variety of clinical settings such as the assessment of chronic renal allograft rejection, detection and management of renal artery stenosis, evaluation of progression risk in chronic kidney disease, differential diagnosis in acute and chronic obstructive renal disease, and more recently as a predictor of renal and global out...