Chest
Original Research: Interstitial Lung DiseaseLung CT Densitometry in Systemic Sclerosis: Correlation With Lung Function, Exercise Testing, and Quality of Life
Section snippets
Selection of Patients
We enrolled 48 consecutive SSc patients from May 2004 to December 2004 (42 women; mean age, 57 ± 13 years [± SD]; range, 18 to 80 years; disease duration, 146 ± 119 months; range, 1 to 524 months). Thirty-three patients were classified as having limited SSc (mean age, 60 ± 12 years; range, 29 to 80 years; disease duration, 166 ± 131 months; range, 1 to 524 months), and 15 patients were classified as having diffuse SSc (mean age, 51 ± 14 years; range, 18 to 66 years; disease duration, 104 ± 78
Results
This study was conducted according to the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology statement.29All patients completed the study. Clinical, functional, and CT data are summarized inTable 1.Fig 1 shows thin-section CT scans and lung density histograms in a patient with a visual score of 3 and in a patient with a visual score of 24, with decreased skewness and kurtosis and increased MLA in the latter.
Table 2 reports QLQ items, 6MWT, functional data, and CT findings in
Discussion
The results of this study indicate that lung density histogram parameters are more reproducible than visual assessment of thin-section CT and are more closely related to functional, exercise, and quality of life impairment in SSc. HRCT is the pivotal radiologic evaluation in interstitial lung disease because of its greater sensitivity as compared to chest radiography, especially for early changes.14, 30, 31A differential diagnosis among the various clinical conditions causing pulmonary fibrosis
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Luca Ermini, Technician of Respiratory Medicine Laboratory, for his contribution in pulmonary function and exercise testing
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A Convolutional Neural Network Approach to Quantify Lung Disease Progression in Patients with Fibrotic Hypersensitivity Pneumonitis (HP)
2022, Academic RadiologyCitation Excerpt :Increased lung fibrosis and decreased ground-glass opacities on serial CT images were associated with disease progression. Previous studies have shown that in patients with lung fibrosis, histogram statistics correlate with physiologic parameters at baseline, including FVC and DLCO (12,13,33), but also that these metrics, as coarse global measures, are not able to localize interstitial lung disease on CT images and therefore are not sufficiently precise for longitudinal analysis (17). In the current study, histogram measures were highly correlated to spirometry changes over time, but we also note that our radiology database was extracted from a single-center and acquired with the same acquisition protocol.
The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.
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