Two studies have recently suggested that perfusion scans combined with chest radiographs give positive predictive values for pulmonary embolism similar to those of ventila-tion-perfusion scans. However, the use of perfusion scans without ventilation studies is not commonly accepted. Nevertheless, the lack of ventilation studies could not explain the poor concordances observed in our study, because the analysis restricted to the ventilation-perfusion lung scans provided similar results. The distribution pattern of standardized conclusions of the ventilation-perfusion lung scans was close to that described previously. Furthermore, this study was focused on current clinical practice and not on 'what should be done” (ie, ventilation scans).
A recent study using a standard algorithm derived from PIOPED criteria showed significant variations in ventilation-perfusion interpretative patterns and diagnostic accuracy between readers more canadian family pharmacy online. Thus, the interpretation of lung scans is a debated issue also. However, our purpose was not to test the physicians’ ability to interpret the results of lung scans but to evaluate if different clinicians interpret the same words and groups of words in the same way.