OBJECTIVES To determine predictors associated with positive chest x-ray finding in patients presenting with non-traumatic chest pain in the Emergency Department (ED). METHODS Health records, including the final radiology reports of all patients who presented with non-traumatic chest pain and had a chest x-ray performed in an urban Canadian tertiary care ED over four consecutive months were re...

PURPOSE To determine whether a routine postoperative chest x-ray is required following uneventful laparoscopic nephrectomy to rule out pneumothorax. METHODS From June 1999 to May 2003, 308 laparoscopic nephrectomy cases were performed by 5 different surgeons. This consisted of 121 radical nephrectomies, 106 donor nephrectomies, 29 simple nephrectomies, 29 partial nephrectomies, and 23 nephrou...

The Oxford English Dictionary defines routine as "a regular course or procedure, a more or less mechanical or unvarying performance of certain acts or duties". Over tie past 20 years a chest radio-graph has become a routine part of the assessment of a patient prior to general anaesthesia. It is right that we should periodically confirm, or perhaps question, our reasons for performing any invest...

A 51-YEAR-OLD white man with a 45-year history of smoking was noted to have an abnormality on a routine chest x-ray. He denied any history of cough, sputum production, chest pain, dyspnea, weight loss, weakness, or tuberculosis. There was no previous chest x-ray available for comparison. The patient’s physical examination results were unremarkable. His chest x-ray is shown in Figure 1 and a com...

Background: Chest X-rays (CXRs) are traditionally performed to determine intra-thoracic injuries in all blunt chest trauma patients in Shahid Bahonar hospital in Kerman. As there are some disadvantages upon CXR and radiation exposure, therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the role of CXR in the diagnosis of intra-thoracic injuries caused by any blunt chest trauma. Me...