Category Archives: Imaging

Chest X-Ray After Chest Tube Insertion: Why Do We Do It?

September 14, 2017 The Trauma Pro Leave a comment

More dogma, or is it actually useful? Any time a chest tube (tube thoracostomy) is inserted, we automatically order a chest x-ray. Even the ATLS course recommends obtaining an image after placement. But anything we do “automatically” is grounds for critical analysis to see if there is a valid reason for doing it.

A South African group looked at the utility of this practice retrospectively in 1004 of their patients. They place 1042 tubes. Here are the factoids:

Patients were included if they had at least one chest x-ray obtained after insertion
Patients were grouped as follows: Group A (10%) had the tube inserted on clinical grounds with no pre-insertion x-ray (e.g. tension pneumothorax). Group B (19%) had a chest x-ray before and had ongoing clinical concerns after insertion. Group C (71%) had a chest-xray before and no ongoing concerns.
75% of injuries were penetrating (75% stab, 25% GSW), 25% were blunt
Group A (insertion with pre-x-ray): 9% had post-insertion findings that prompted a management change (kinked, not inserted far enough)
Group B (ongoing clinical concerns): 58% required a management change based on the post-x-ray. 33% were subcutaneous or not inserted far enough (!!)
Group C (no ongoing clinical concerns): 32 of 710 (5%) required a management change, usually because the tube was too deep

The authors concluded that if there are no clinical concerns (tube functioning, no clinical symptoms) after insertion, then a chest x-ray is not necessary.

Bottom line: But I disagree with the authors! Even with no obvious clinical concerns, the tube may not be functioning for a variety of reasons. Hopefully, this fact would then be discovered the next day when another x-ray is obtained. But this delays the usual progression toward removing the tube promptly by at least one day. It increases hospital stay, as well as the likelihood of infection or other hospital-associated complication. A chest x-ray is cheap compared to a day in the hospital, which would potentially happen in 5% of these patients. I recommend that we continue to obtain a simple one-view chest x-ray after tube insertion.

Related posts:

Reference: What is the yield of routine chest radiography following tube thoracostomy for trauma? Injury 46(1):45-48, 2015.

Imaging

When Can You Take A Hypotensive Patient To CT?

August 1, 2017 The Trauma Pro Leave a comment

The last two posts, I went on a rant about taking hypotensive patients to CT. The bottom line is that this is a generally bad idea, even if bad papers say it’s okay. However, we all know that there are no absolutes, especially in trauma.

So yes, there are two cases where one could justify taking a hypotensive patient to CT scan. Here they are:

You believe that your patient has a catastrophic brain injury which is responsible for the hypotension. You would like CT confirmation so you can begin to withdraw support and terminate any other interventions.
Your patient has sustained a cervical spinal cord injury and has neurogenic shock. You have started fluid resuscitation and are considering a pressor to normalize blood pressure, but would like to continue your diagnostic routine.

But before you can even consider leaving your resuscitation room, you must ensure that there is no other source of hypotension. This means getting chest and pelvic xrays to look for hemothorax or fractures. It means getting a good FAST exam to make sure there is no significant hemoperitoneum. It also means making sure that any fractures are properly splinted and there is no uncontrolled external bleeding.

You can only go to CT scan once all of these other potential bleeding sources have been ruled out. If in doubt, you must proceed to OR to either stop the bleeding or prove that it does not exist.

Are there any other reasons to take one of these patients to CT that you can think of? If so, leave comments or tweet!

Related post:

Can I take a hypotensive patient to CT?

Imaging

Can I Take A Hypotensive Patient to CT? Part 2

July 31, 2017 The Trauma Pro 2 Comments

In my last post, I commented on a paper that tried to claim that there is no reason not to take a patient to CT if they are hypotensive. It had issues, as you saw. Today, I want to share another paper from a few years ago that tried to do the same. Again, read the abstract!

I’ve said it before: hypotension and CT scanners don’t play together well. For years I’ve cautioned against this, having seen a number of patients crash and burn in this area early in my career. But it’s a common error, and may jeopardize your patient’s safety. A paper that is now in press looked at this practice in a trauma hospital in Taiwan.

Patients who had blunt abdominal trauma were retrospectively reviewed. Those who remained hypotensive (SBP<90) after 2L of crystalloid were scruitnized. The CT scanner was described as being located in the same area as the ED resuscitation rooms. Furthermore, several physicians and nurses were present during scans, and a full selection of resuscitation equipment was available in the scan area.

Here are the factoids:

909 patients were entered into the study
Only 91 patients remained hypotensive after initial resuscitation, and only 58 of these were scanned before definitive management
As expected, patients who were hypotensive after initial resuscitation had more serious injuries (ISS 22 vs 12), required more blood transfusions (938 vs 202 cc), and had a higher mortality (10% vs 1%).
There were no significant differences in comparing hypotensive patients who went to CT scan vs those who did not if they underwent some sort of hemostatic procedure (laparotomy, angioembolization)
In the hypotensive patients, time to OR in the CT scan group was 58 minutes vs 62 minutes for those who skipped the scan.
In the same patients, time to angio in the CT scan group was 147 minutes vs 140 minutes without a scan first.

The authors conclude that “hypotension does not always make performing a CT scan unfeasible.” (weak!)

Read this paper closely and don’t get fooled! It is very retrospective and very small. And if you look at the times carefully, you will see some funny business. How can time to OR or angio be virtually identical regardless of whether CT is used? Is it the world’s closest, fastest scanner? Probably not.

The authors showed that hypotensive patients have a ten-fold increase in mortality. They also recognized that definitive control of hemorrhage is the key to saving the patients. Unfortunately, there are factors in this retrospective study, such as various biases and some undocumented factors that make their two patient groups look artificially alike. This gives the appearance that the CT scan makes no difference.

In reality, the fact that there is no difference in times ensures that there is no clinical difference in outcome. To really answer this question, this kind of study must be done prospectively, and must have an adequate population size.

Bottom line: Don’t even consider going to CT with hypotensive patients. Even if you have the fastest, closest scanner in the world. Shock time still kills, and most CT scan rooms are very poor resuscitation rooms. If your patient is unstable in the ED, do your ABCs, get a quick exam, then transport to the area where you can get control of the bleeding. This will nearly always be your OR.

Reference: Hypotension does not always make computed tomography scans unfeasible in the management of blunt trauma patients. Injury, 46(1):29-34, 2015.

Imaging

The Pan-Scan For Trauma

July 26, 2017 The Trauma Pro Leave a comment

Diagnostic imaging is a mainstay in diagnosing injuries in major trauma patients. But the big questions are, how much is enough and how much is too much? X-radiation is invisible but not innocuous. Trauma professionals tend to pay little attention to radiation that they can’t see in order to diagnose things they can’t otherwise see. And which may not even be there.

There are two major camps working in emergency departments: scan selectively vs scan everything. It all boils down to a balance between irradiating enough to be satisfied that nothing has been missed, and irradiating too much and causing harm later.

A very enlightening study was published last year from the group at the University of New South Wales. They prospectively looked at their experience while moving from selective scanning to pan-scanning.They studied over 600 patients in each cohort, looking at radiation exposure, missed injuries, and patient injury and discharge disposition variables.

Here are the factoids:

Absolute risk of receiving a higher radiation dose increased with pan-scanning from 12% to 20%. This translates to 1 extra person of every 13 evaluated receiving a higher dose.
The incidence of receiving >20 mSv radiation dose nearly doubled after pan-scanning. This is the threshold at which we believe that cancer risk changes from low (<1:1000) to moderate (>1:1000).
The risk of receiving >20 mSv was lower in less severely injured patients (sigh of relief)
There were 6 missed injuries with selective scanning and 4 with pan-scanning (not significant). All were relatively minor.

Bottom line: Granted, the study groups are relatively small, and the science behind radiation risk is not very exact. But this study is very provocative because it shows that radiation dose increases significantly when pan-scan is used, but there was no benefit in terms of decreased missed injury. If we look at the likelihood of being helped vs harmed, patients are 26 times more likely to be harmed in the long term as they are to be helped in the short term. The defensive medicine naysayers will always argue about “that one catastrophic case” that will be missed, but I’m concerned that we’re creating some problems for our patients in the distant future that we are not worrying enough about right now.

Related posts:

Reference: Comparison of radiation exposure of trauma patients from diagnostic radiology procedures before and after the introduction of a panscan protocol. Emerg Med Australasia 24(1):43-51, 2012.

Imaging

Routine CT After Operative Exploration For Penetrating Trauma

July 12, 2017 The Trauma Pro Leave a comment

CT scans are commonly used to aid the workup of patients with blunt trauma. They are occasionally useful in penetrating trauma, specifically when penetration into a body cavity is uncertain and the patient has no hard signs that would send him or her immediately to the operating room.

Is there any role in operative penetrating trauma, after the patient has already been to the OR? The dogma has always been that the eyeballs of the surgeon in the OR are better than any other imaging modality. Really?

The surgical group at San Francisco General addressed this question by retrospectively reviewing 6 years of their operative penetrating injury registry data. They were interested in finding how many occult injuries (seen with CT but not by the surgeon) were found on a postop CT. A total of 225 patients who underwent operative management of penetrating abdomen or chest injury were included.

Here are the factoids:

Only 110 patients had a postop CT scan; 73 had scans within the first 24 hours, the other 37 were scanned later
Rationale for early scan was to investigate retroperitoneal injury in half of patients, but frequently no indication was given (41%)
Rationale for late scan was for workup of ileus in one third, or for evaluation of new or unexpected clinical problems
Occult injuries were found in about half of early CT patients (52%), and 22% of late CT patients
The most common occult injuries were fractures, GU issues, regraded solid organ injury, and unrecognized vascular injuries
Several management changes occurred, including

Bottom line: There appears to be a significant benefit to sending some penetrating injury patients to CT in the early postop period. Specifically, those with injury to the retroperitoneum, deep into the liver, near the spine, or with multiple and complicated injuries would benefit. Simple stabs and gunshots that stay away from these areas/structures probably do not need followup imaging.

Rreference: Routine computed tomography after recent operative exploration for penetrating trauma: What injuries do we miss? J Trauma, published ahead of print, May 11, 2017.

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