The clinical outcome of pSS patients with lung involvement in Taiwan is not very favorable. Although HRCT score was poorly correlated with PFT, high HRCT score was significantly associated with higher mortality.

Image-guided tumor ablation for lung malignancies has emerged as a treatment modality for medically inoperable patients. Overall, image-guided lung tumor ablation is a minimally invasive procedure that has an acceptable safety profile and less impact on lung function. This is important for patients with poor pulmonary and/or cardiac functions or with multiple comorbidities, which prevent them from undergoing surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy. Herein, we review the principle, techniques, clinical application, and patient outcomes of image-guided lung tumor ablation.

TEVAR for type B aortic dissection repair has less perioperative mortality, a shorter length of hospitalization, a higher midterm survival rate, less postoperative respiratory failure, and fewer wound complications than open surgery.

Objective:To determine the evolutionary MRI appearance of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) following cryoablation.Methods:For this institution review board-approved study, we recruited patients with biopsy-proven RCC and treated them with percutaneous cryoablation between November 2009 and October 2014. Two radiologists retrospectively reviewed the pre-procedural and follow-up MRI. The findings included tumour sizes, signal intensities on T1 weighted imaging (T1WI), T2 weighted imaging (T2WI), diffusion-weighted imaging, apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) map and contrast enhancement patterns. The ADC values of the tumours before and after treatment were measured.Results:A total of 26 patients were enrolled. The ablated tumours exhibited predominantly high signals on T1WI at 1–9-month follow-up (47.1% strong hyperintense at 3 months) and subsequently returned to being isointense. In T2WI, the signals of the ablated tumours were highly variable during the first 3 months and became strikingly hypointense after 6 months (58.3% strong hypointense at 6 months). Diffusion restriction was prominent during the first 3 months (lowest ADC: 0.62 ± 0.29 × 10−3 mm2 s−1 at 1 month). Contrast enhancement persisted up to 6 months after the procedure. The residual enhancement gradually increased in the dynamic scan and was most prominent in the delay phase.Conclusion:The MRI of the cryoablated renal tumour follows a typical evolutionary pattern.Advances in knowledge:Familiarity of practitioners with the normal post-cryoablation change of RCC on MRI can enable the early detection and prevention of tumour recurrence.

The tortuosity index method has low interobserver and intraobserver variability in measuring the tortuosity of the thoracic aorta in patients with thoracic aortic aneurysm. The characteristics of the aorta and aneurysm are not associated with the interobserver or intraobserver variability of the tortuosity index.