the fna (fine needle aspiration) procedure is simple, inexpensive, available and a safe method for the diagnosis of a neck mass. fna has numerous advantages over open surgical biopsies as an initial diagnostic tool; therefore we decided to compare the accuracy of this method with open biopsy. this retrospective as well as descriptive study comparing preoperative fna results with existing data i...

1. the most important challenge in diagnosis of celiac disease is not-performing the diagnostic tests in suspected persons. because of multi-organ damage and multiple manifestations of disease, diagnosis of celiac disease may be delayed. it seems general physicians should be aware about uncommon presentations of disease and indications of celiac tests. 2. the second most important challenge is ...

BACKGROUND Tuberculosis (TB) case notification rates are usually higher in men than in women, but notification data are insufficient to measure sex differences in disease burden. This review set out to systematically investigate whether sex ratios in case notifications reflect differences in disease prevalence and to identify gaps in access to and/or utilisation of diagnostic services. METHOD...

To aid physicians who may be having difficulty applying the principles of decision analysis to diagnostic data according to the methods published in the past several years, the authors of this paper set out a few principles and schemes for using and interpreting diagnostic data obtained from dichotomous tests. They also present a simple BASIC program for calculating post-test probabilities from...

OBJECTIVE We assessed the lesion detectability of low-dose diagnostic (123)I-metaiodobenzylguanidine (MIBG) whole-body scans obtained at 6 and 24 h compared with posttreatment (131)I-MIBG whole-body scans in malignant pheochromocytoma and paraganglioma. METHODS Scintigrams obtained in 15 patients with malignant pheochromocytoma and paraganglioma were retrospectively analyzed. Diagnostic scans...

Background Adenosine perfusion imaging at 1.5 Tesla (T) has been shown to yield good diagnostic values in comparison to quantitative coronary angiography. Perfusion imaging at 3 T has the potential benefit of higher contrastand signalto-noise ratios. However, little is known about diagnostic performance of 3 T perfusion imaging in comparison to 1.5 T and in comparison to invasive measurement of...

M e t h o d s Data sources: MEDLINE, EMBASE/ Excerpta Medica (to June 2006), reference lists, and experts in the field. Study selection and assessment: English-language studies that evaluated the diagnostic test performance of MRI in mainly adult patients (≥ 80% of patients ≥ 16 y of age) with foot infection or suspected osteomyelitis of the foot or ankle, using bone biopsy (histologic analysis...

BACKGROUND Magnetic resonance cholangiopancreatography (MRCP) is an alternative to diagnostic endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) for investigating biliary obstruction. The use of MRCP, a non-invasive procedure, may prevent the use of unnecessary invasive procedures. The aim of the study was to compare the findings of MRCP with those of ERCP by the computation of accuracy stat...

BACKGROUND Antinuclear antibodies (ANA), smooth muscle antibodies (SMA) and antibodies to a soluble liver antigen/liver pancreas (anti-SLA/LP) are useful markers that can help clinicians to diagnose and classify autoimmune hepatitis (AIH). OBJECTIVES To determine whether ANA, SMA and anti-SLA/LP help to accurately diagnose patients with AIH. SEARCH STRATEGY The PubMed, CNKI, WANFANG, and Si...

This study explores spoken medical narratives in which dermatologists were shown images of dermatological conditions and asked to explain their reasoning process while working toward a diagnosis. This corpus has been annotated by a domain expert for information-rich conceptual units of thought, providing opportunity for analysis of the link between diagnostic reasoning steps and speech features...