Keywords:
Management, Pulmonary vessels, Professional issues, CT-Angiography, Structured reporting, Efficacy studies, Statistics, Quality assurance, Epidemiology, Workforce
Authors:
M. Buk1, O. von Stackelberg2, E. Giannitsis2, L. Kihm2, H. U. Kauczor2, T. F. Weber2; 1Prague/CZ, 2Heidelberg/DE
DOI:
10.26044/ecr2019/C-1959
Methods and materials
CTPA examinations requested for clinical suspicion of PE dating from January 2017 to April 2018 were retrospectively analyzed.
In total there were 285 cases,
out of which we selected only clinically stable outpatients due to poorer D-dimer value reliability in hospitalized patients as mentioned above.
The diagnostic algorithm is applicable only to clinically stable patients (in unstable patients CTPA is always indicated as mentioned above),
which is why we excluded hospitalized patients.
As a result,
we included 155 cases.
Data from hospital EHR and CTPA request forms (available in RIS) were reviewed to assess the appropriateness of CTPA examinations.
The D-dimer value can be viewed in the laboratory software accessible from RIS and it is common practice for radiologists to reach out for the lab results this way,
hence it was regarded as if they were transferred to the CTPA request form.
The correctness of CTPA indication was evaluated based on first,
RIS data alone and,
second,
data merged from both RIS and EHR.
The goal was to quantify the discrepancy between these two data sets and to identify the types of information that are important in the diagnostic algorithm yet are missing in RIS,
therefore are not readily available to the radiologist.
Additional relevant clinical information not included in rGS was documented,
as well as other clinical findings besides PE.