Recent Advances in Imaging

摘要

Pulmonary involvement in cystic fibrosis (CF) is heterogeneous, especially in the early stages, and so may not be accurately depicted by global measures of pulmonary function. Imaging studies, in particular computed tomography (CT), can display regional variation in CF lung disease. Chest radiography remains one of the most widely used diagnostic methods for assessing progression of CF lung disease.Thin-section or high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) has been shown to have significantly higher sensitivity in depicting lung airway abnormalities than chest radiography. Spirometrically triggered HRCT technique can be used to ensure comparable images for serial evaluations, but is not generally used in clinical practice. Controlled ventilation technique is recommended in young infants who cannot cooperate with breath holding. Low-dose thin-section CT can achieve a 40-50% reduction of radiation dose without affecting image quality. HRCT scoring systems have been proposed that may aid the earlier detection of lung damage, objective evaluation of the progression of disease, and as a research tool in the assessment of response to newly developed treatments. Although the role of conventional proton density MRI in CF patients is limited, preliminary studies with hyperpolarized ~3He MRI in CF suggest that early functional abnormalities may be more readily detected, before morphologic changes on HRCT are evident.