Is CT useful in the Emergency Room? Of course!

Everyday new imaging practices emerge and hence, the computed tomography (CT) remains an important tool in the evaluation of patients who show critical symptoms of chest pain and trauma in the emergency department (ED), reported a recent review.

Researchers from various Centres in U.S. for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, Atlanta, GA, USA) have just completed studying the demographics and current imaging practices of radiologists who have been with EDs. This research was an offshoot of the recent findings by the CDC that revealed that out of close to eleven million ED visits per year in the U.S, 44% of these patients undergo imaging studies in the ED itself. The data for this came from 192 radiology groups who had responded to an online survey. Further the data showed that CT scanners were the most used equipment for imaging in ED’s.

The results also showed that 21% of the surveyed groups had been designated to emergency radiology divisions, while 33% of the groups used CT coronary angiography in the workup of chest-pain in the Emergency Department(ED), and 18% used “triple-rule-out scans”. Multiplanar reconstructions of chest, pelvic, and abdominal CT images were routinely being performed by 49% of the groups, while 44% still used the reformatted CT images in the workup of cervical spine trauma. 21% of the surveyed groups had dedicated divisions of emergency radiology, surprisingly though that the majority of them (73%) are in academic centers. This review was published in the recent issue of Journal of the American College of Radiology for the month of July 2008.

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