Importance: Airflow obstruction on spirometry is universally used to define chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and current or former smokers without airflow obstruction may assume that they are disease free.
Objective: To identify clinical and radiologic evidence of smoking-related disease in a cohort of current and former smokers who did not meet spirometric criteria for COPD, for whom we adopted the discarded label of Global Initiative for Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) 0.
Design, Setting, And Participants: Individuals from the Genetic Epidemiology of COPD (COPDGene) cross-sectional observational study completed spirometry, chest computed tomography (CT) scans, a 6-minute walk, and questionnaires.
Rationale: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is associated with a worse overall survival in non-small cell lung cancer. Lung emphysema is one component of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. We hypothesized that emphysema of the tumor region may result in larger tumors and a poorer overall survival.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Respir Crit Care Med
September 2015
Rationale: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is defined by the presence of airflow limitation on spirometry, yet subjects with COPD can have marked differences in computed tomography imaging. These differences may be driven by genetic factors. We hypothesized that a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of quantitative imaging would identify loci not previously identified in analyses of COPD or spirometry.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a leading cause of morbidity, mortality and resource use worldwide. The goal of this official American Thoracic Society (ATS)/European Respiratory Society (ERS) Research Statement is to describe evidence related to diagnosis, assessment, and management; identify gaps in knowledge; and make recommendations for future research. It is not intended to provide clinical practice recommendations on COPD diagnosis and management.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To investigate CT appearance and size of the thymus in association with participant characteristics.
Materials And Methods: 2540 supposedly healthy participants (mean age 58.9 years, 51 % female) were evaluated for the CT appearance of thymic glands with four-point scores (according to the ratio of fat and soft tissue), size and morphology.
Background: Cardiovascular diseases are frequent and a major cause of death in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). In the general population, various fat depots including abdominal visceral adipose tissue (VAT), subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT), and liver fat have been linked to increased risk of cardiovascular diseases. We hypothesize that these adipose tissue compartments are associated with myocardial infarction (MI) in patients with COPD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To investigate the prevalence and distribution of paraseptal emphysema on chest CT images in the Framingham Heart Study (FHS) population, and assess its impact on pulmonary function. Also pursued was the association with interstitial lung abnormalities.
Materials And Methods: We assessed 2633 participants in the FHS for paraseptal emphysema on chest CT.
Background: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease causes significant morbidity and concomitant pulmonary vascular disease and cardiac dysfunction are associated with poor prognosis. Computed tomography-detected relative pulmonary artery (PA) enlargement defined as a PA to ascending aorta diameter ratio >1 (PA:A>1) is a marker for pulmonary hypertension and predicts chronic obstructive pulmonary disease exacerbations. However, little is known about the relationship between the PA:A ratio, pulmonary blood volume, and cardiac function.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Computed tomographic (CT) airway lumen narrowing is associated with lower lung function. Although volumetric CT measures of airways (wall volume [WV] and lumen volume [LV]) compared to cross sectional measures can more accurately reflect bronchial morphology, data of their use in never smokers is scarce. We hypothesize that native tracheobronchial tree morphology as assessed by volumetric CT metrics play a significant role in determining lung function in normal subjects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUncontrolled pilot studies demonstrated promising results of endoscopic lung volume reduction using emphysematous lung sealant (ELS) in patients with advanced, upper lobe predominant emphysema. We aimed to evaluate the safety and efficacy of ELS in a randomised controlled setting.Patients were randomised to ELS plus medical treatment or medical treatment alone.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a leading cause of morbidity, mortality, and resource use worldwide. The goal of this Official American Thoracic Society (ATS)/European Respiratory Society (ERS) Research Statement is to describe evidence related to diagnosis, assessment, and management; identify gaps in knowledge; and make recommendations for future research. It is not intended to provide clinical practice recommendations on COPD diagnosis and management.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a leading cause of morbidity, mortality, and resource use worldwide. The goal of this official American Thoracic Society (ATS)/European Respiratory Society (ERS) research statement is to describe evidence related to diagnosis, assessment and management; identify gaps in knowledge; and make recommendations for future research. It is not intended to provide clinical practice recommendations on COPD diagnosis and management.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRationale: Low educational attainment is a risk factor of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). There is limited knowledge on the relationship between educational level and computed tomography measures of emphysema and airway wall thickness (AWT).
Objectives: We hypothesized that low educational attainment is associated with increased emphysema and AWT in ever-smokers with and without COPD.
Am J Respir Crit Care Med
June 2015
Rationale: Interstitial lung disease (ILD), a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in rheumatoid arthritis (RA), is highly prevalent, yet RA-ILD is underrecognized.
Objectives: To identify clinical risk factors, autoantibodies, and biomarkers associated with the presence of RA-ILD.
Methods: Subjects enrolled in Brigham and Women's Hospital Rheumatoid Arthritis Sequential Study (BRASS) and American College of Rheumatology (ACR) cohorts were evaluated for ILD.
Rationale And Objectives: Pulmonary vascular complications of liver disease have a substantial impact on morbidity and mortality in patients who undergo liver transplant. The effect of liver transplantation on the pulmonary vasculature in patients without pulmonary vascular disease, however, has not been described. This study was undertaken to characterize the regional effect of liver transplant on the cross-sectional area (CSA) of pulmonary vessels.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: COPD includes the chronic bronchitis (CB) and emphysema phenotypes. Although it is generally assumed that emphysema or chronic airflow obstruction (CAO) is associated with worse quality of life (QOL) than is CB, this assumption has not been tested.
Methods: The current study's analyses from the Lovelace Smokers' Cohort (LSC) were validated in the COPD Gene Cohort (COPDGene).
Rationale: Former smoking history and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are potential risk factors for osteoporosis and fractures. Under existing guidelines for osteoporosis screening, women are included but men are not, and only current smoking is considered.
Objectives: To demonstrate the impact of COPD and smoking history on the risk of osteoporosis and vertebral fracture in men and women.
Purpose: To investigate the prevalence and CT image characteristics of anterior mediastinal masses in a population-based cohort and their association with the demographics of the participants.
Materials And Methods: Chest CT scans of 2571 Framingham Heart Study participants (mean age 58.9 years, 51% female) were evaluated by two board-certified radiologists with expertise in thoracic imaging for the presence of anterior mediastinal masses, their shape, contour, location, invasion of adjacent structures, fat content, and calcification.
Rationale: Few studies have examined associations between long-term exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and lung function decline in adults.
Objectives: To determine if exposure to traffic and PM2.
Proc IEEE Int Symp Biomed Imaging
April 2014
Emphysema has distinct and well-defined visually apparent CT patterns called centrilobular and panlobular emphysema. Existing studies concentrated on the classification of these patterns but they have not looked at the complete evolution of this disease as the destruction of lung parenchyma progresses from normal lung tissue to mild, moderate, and severe disease with complete effacement of the lung architecture. In this paper, we discretize this continuous process into five classes of increasing disease severity and construct a training set of 1161 CT patches.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc IEEE Comput Soc Conf Comput Vis Pattern Recognit
June 2014
The main contribution of this work is a framework to register anatomical structures characterized as a point set where each point has an associated symmetric matrix. These matrices can represent problem-dependent characteristics of the registered structure. For example, in airways, matrices can represent the orientation and thickness of the structure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present a novel airway labeling algorithm based on a Hidden Markov Tree Model (HMTM). We obtain a collection of discrete points along the segmented airway tree using particles sampling [1] and establish topology using Kruskal's minimum spanning tree algorithm. Following this, our HMTM algorithm probabilistically assigns labels to each point.
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