The correlation of the radiologic extent of lung transplantation edema with pulmonary oxygenation.

Abstract

The study set out to evaluate the relationship between the efficiency of pulmonary oxygenation and the extent of the reimplantation response as revealed on chest radiography after bilateral lung transplantation. Postoperative chest radiographs of 31 patients who had undergone bilateral lung transplantation were evaluated for the extent of the reimplantation response. For each patient, the contemporaneous oxygenation indexes (partial pressure of oxygen in arterial blood divided by fraction of inspired oxygen) were calculated and correlated with a radiographic score produced from the evaluation of chest radiographs. The method of evaluating chest radiographs for the extent of the reimplantation response was shown to be reproducible. Although mean oxygenation indexes were found to decrease with increasing radiographic scores, this trend was not statistically significant. Although the extent of the reimplantation response on the early postoperative chest radiography inversely correlated with the oxygenation efficiency of the transplanted lungs, this finding was not statistically significant.