Postoperative Evaluation of Funnel Chest - The role of radiologic indices -

Abstract

There are many objective indices of operative outcome of funnel chest, but there has been only a few report about the postoperative change of these indices and which is best correlated with subjective outcome. From January 1989 to December 1991, 74 patients with funnel chest underwent Ravitch operation and radiologic evaluation was performed on the twenty patients whose operative outcome were satisfactory by Humphreys` criteria and postoperative chest X-ray were available. Variable radiologic chest idices such as deformity grade [DG], lower vertebral index [LVI], upper vertebral index [UVI] and configuration index [CI] were measured preoperatively and 1, 6, 12 and 18 months pos-toperatively. The mean value of preoperative DG, LVI, UVI and CI were 5.32, 0.3, 0.26 and 1.01 respectively, and postoperative chages were as follows; DG; 3.13, 3.66, 3, 72, 4.0, LVI: 0.22, 0, 24, 0.25, 0.25 UVI; 0.27, 0.27, 0.27, 0.27 CI; 0.69, 0.77, 0.76, 0.79. The increments of CI were within the 90 percent confidence limit of normogram in most cases, but it was not true for LVI and UVI. And the differences between the observed and expected values of CI did not change significantly through the postoperative periods, which was not the case in LVI. We concluded from these results that 1] DG, LVI and CI were increased slowly during the postoperative follow up periods but the increments of CI were usually within the normal limits and so 2] CI can be used as a objective index of satisfactory outcome.

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