الفهرس 
ANATOMY OF THE LUNGOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
T
his study was performed to evaluate the role of HRCT in diagnosis of Chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a common chronic lung disorder, usually related to cigarette smoking, representing a major and increasing cause of morbidity and mortality. It is defined ”as a disease state characterized by airflow limitation that is not fully reversible. It includes chronic bronchitis, emphysema, chronic asthma, and bronchieactasis.
HRCT is the use of a very narrow x-ray beam collimation (1mm) with a high-spatial-frequency reconstruction algorithm to detect and characterize airways diseases.
This study was conducted on 30 patients referred from Chest Department of Ain Shams University Hospital to Radiology Department during Oct.2012 to June 2013. They were presented with cough, expectoration, difficult breathing, and referred for HRCT of the chest. There were 14 females and 16 males, there ages ranged from 17 to 76 years, we noticed that the most common affected age group is the group ages from 61 to 76 years in males (7 patients) and from 41to 60 years in females (9 patients).
High resolution computed tomography (CT) is an accurate imaging technique for the detection of emphysema which was assessed by determining the area of both lungs, measuring less than -950 Hounsfield units (HU).
The severity of emphysema was found to be closely related to duration of smoking. Centrilobular emphysema was particularly found to be closely related to smoking.
Airway remodeling according to HRCT features is not different between atopic and non atopic asthmatics, suggesting that these changes occur regardless of the underlying cause.
Bronchial wall thickening and, bronchial dilatation were reported as the most prominent abnormality in CT scans of asthmatics.
Emphysema were significantly higher in subjects with asthma with a smoking history, although it is also observed in nonsmoking asthmatics high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) is commonly used to grade severity and extent of bronchiectasis. The severity of airflow obstruction was found to be related to the extent of bronchiectatic segments as demonstrated on HRCT.
The extent of CT evidence of small airway disease (decreased lung attenuation and expiratory air trapping) has been proven to be the major determinant of airflow obstruction.
The technique of high-resolution CT (HRCT) has rapidly become an important and sensitive tool in study of patients with suspected airways disease. However, there are a number of potential pitfalls of HRCT. These pitfalls may be related to the technical quality of the HRCT scan.