Ventilation-perfusion mismatching as prognostic factor of respiratory failure after pulmonary resection.

This paper reports the results of a retrospective study undertaken to assess the reliability of regional ventilation-perfusion pulmonary scanning in predicting the remaining respiratory function (pFEV1), and the early and long-term outcome of 33 patients with chronic airways disease, submitted to pulmonary resection at the 1st Department of Surgery. All patients had been diagnosed as resectable with the traditional tools and had a traditional pFEV1 (tpFEV1) greater than 800 ml. All pFEV1 were re-calculated (npFEV1) with our new formula which also includes as lost for function all lung areas not to be resected with V/Q mismatching.