Cullen Ruff is a radiologist and author of Looking Within: Understanding Ourselves through Human Imaging.
There is currently a pandemic-related shortage of iodinated contrast used for CT scans, predicted to last for several months. While the industry is addressing its own lessons on the supply side of production and distribution, those of us in clinical medicine may use this shortage as an educational opportunity to address contrast demand.
There are multiple ways to perform a CT scan of the same body part, depending on the patient’s …
An excerpt from Looking Within: Understanding Ourselves through Human Imaging.
It started as a routine weekend shift, reading studies on patients in the hospital and the emergency department, when the phone rang. Jessie, the nuclear medicine technologist, spoke on the telephone, his matter-of-fact tone slightly colored by …
It was a common enough reason for someone to have a CT scan. The order read, “Abdominal pain, colon cancer resected in January.” It was now March, only two months post-surgery. Yet the patient’s CT scan showed a number of large masses in the liver, consistent with metastatic cancer.
I compared the current study to the CT performed before surgery. The liver had looked perfectly normal at that time.
“That’s an amazingly …
Let’s begin with a quiz question:
Patients may be allergic to:
A. oxygen
B. carbon
C. iodine
D. none of the above
If you answered anything but “D,” better keep reading.
Consider this scenario: If a patient is allergic to penicillin, you would document “penicillin” in the medical records. It would never occur to you to list “antibiotics” as an allergy, and you certainly would not call it a “carbon” allergy for slang, just because penicillin contains …
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