Systematic approach to requesting and interpreting chest X-ray and its principles: what every clinician must know
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4314/wnjms.v8i2.6Abstract
Introduction: Clinicians should be able to exclude major abnormality in radiographs, while the radiologist is abased with high complex imaging. In both medical and surgical practice, X-ray is the most common imaging for diagnostic and therapeutic uses. For initial assessment, plain X-ray is the finest method to visualize the bony skeleton. Chest X-ray (CXR) is the main modality to visualize the lung, pleura and mediastinal abnormalities. Clinicians making chest X-ray request must be mindful of dangers of radiation exposure. The number of chest radiographs requested can overwhelm the number of radiologists in developing countries. Quality assurance studies shows discordance between interpretation reports by emergency physicians and radiologists narrowed to 1.1% from 45% in developed nations. Basic chest X-ray is what every doctor that contact patients must be competent at interpreting starting with medical students, to close the discordance gap in developing nations, and hence the purpose of this paper which presents the principles guiding chest X-rays, from request to interpretation as a refresher that improves clinician’s diagnostic accuracy.
Methods: Relevant literature search using key words like chest, X-ray, systematic, interpretation and clinician in Medline, Ajol, Embase and Google scholar were done. Articles were selected for relevance to chest radiograph.
Result: A detailed guide to requesting and interpreting CXR is presented
Conclusion: Clinicians can increase precision of chest X-ray interpretation acumen from practice and training.
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