Five thousand acute care/emergency department chest radiographs: comparison of requisitions with radiographic findings.

Five-thousand portable or posterior-anterior-lateral radiographs of acute care emergency department patients were interpreted. They revealed serious disease in 35% of patients with chest symptoms, in 27% of all patients examined, and in 18% of patients with noncardiorespiratory symptoms. The highest incidence of abnormal radiographs (42%-79%) occurred in patients with symptoms of congestive heart failure, dyspnea, hemoptysis, dysrhythmia, and hypertension. Asthma (14%) and trauma (5%) presented the lowest incidence of significant findings. Radiographs of patients suspected of having pneumonia were abnormal in 25% of cases, and in those patients with either cough or fever alone, the incidences of pneumonia were 13% and 18%. Whereas 24% of patients with dyspnea alone had radiographic findings of congestive heart failure, 52% of those with congestive heart failure diagnosed on clinical grounds had abnormal radiographs. The chest radiograph continues to be a significantly important examination in the diagnosis of disease, the prevention of overtreatment, and the redirection of clinical investigation in the acute care emergency department unit.

Cooperative study of radiologic aspects of renovascular hypertension. Bilateral renovascular disease.

Abnormal urographic features were present in 60.7% of 250 patients with bilateral diseases. The urogram was relatively insensitive in the minority of patients whose lesions were of approximately equivalent severity bilaterally. In bilateral renovascular disease, the urogram demonstrated some surgical prognostic value that was not evident in unilateral renovascular disease. Furthermore, in patients with bilateral disease, the urogram was helpful in deciding between unilateral or bilateral operation.