Friday, June 25, 2010

Is CT head relevant in current scenario?

This is what i read as a comment in yahoo news by my friend Dr Philip Chao who has worked in Delaware to produce the best MRIs possible since 1990. He has monitored hundreds of thousands of MRIs over his career at the University of Pennsylvania and working for the people of Delaware. He is a board certified neuroradiologist and recently passed his maintenance of certification examination in 2006. He is also trained in body MRI and was the body MRI fellow at the University of Pensylvania from 1988 through 1990.

This what he says
 "CT of the head is almost useless. This is a fact I tried to teach residents for years. Usually they do a CT scan of the head non contrast - this is woefully inadequate to pick up stroke, tumor or meningitis. In fact it misses bleeding in the brain if it is older than 24 hours old. The funny thing is that if the CT is negative you get an MRI because a negative CT does not rule out significant intracranial pathology. If the CT is positive you STILL get an MRI because you see the lesion margins better and additional lesions with MRI. So... in both cases a negative and a positive CT does not prevent you from getting further testing. "



Sounds like soon we will not see the plain CT anymore. Thinking of it now, how may times we have actually recommended MRI after CT, kind of makes sense. Other than head injury this logiq seems quite valid, what are your views?

All comments and discussions are welcome.

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