AuntMinnie.com CT Radiology Insider

Dear CT Insider,

Continuing our series on CT in the urgent care setting, today's Insider Exclusive examines the modality's use in penetrating trauma.

The topic is timely. New statistics show a steadily rising incidence of gunshot violence and injuries in urban areas across the U.S. And as this week's news reports underscore, hunters in rural parts of Texas aren't immune, either.

Dr. Amy Sisley, trauma physician and assistant professor of surgery at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, has seen her share of serious injuries. In a discussion at the recent Society of Critical Care Medicine meeting in San Francisco, she talked about patients at her own institution, and about CT's emerging role in the triage and diagnosis of the trauma patients most in need of speedy treatment.

One very neat trick is CT's ability to track the path of a gunshot wound, enabling doctors to quickly assess what was hit and what was hurt.

There are many ways to examine penetrating injuries, of course, and sometimes gold standards like arteriography are still golden. But backed by the literature, Sisley notes that CT has proved superior more often than not due to its speed, noninvasiveness, and growing accuracy. Click here for the rest of the story.

In other news, CT has gotten a big boost for lung cancer screening from the publication of I-ELCAP data in this week's Archives of Internal Medicine. CT lung screening is finding more small and potentially curable cancers than previously thought. The data, originally reported on AuntMinnie.com more than a month ago, were also encouraging in the small number of metastases found. The evidence, while not the equivalent of a mortality benefit, is encouraging.

Also this week in our CT Digital Community, researchers in Essen, Germany, found that CT calcium scores can vary widely based on the reconstruction interval. The reconstruction with the least motion artifact -- not the highest score -- is likely to be the most accurate. The upshot: Several reconstructions are needed to get the most accurate score, the team concluded.

Just scroll down to find all the CT news that fits.