Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, this paper by van der Pol LM, et al. studied 510 expecting women to see if an algorithm could diagnose pulmonary embolism without the need for imaging.
The aim of the study is to see if it is an effective alternative to ventilation-perfusion scanning and CT pulmonary angiography. These two traditional tests expose both the pregnant woman and the fetus to radiation.
Researchers evaluated three criteria from the YEARS algorithm. They were the clinical signs of hemoptysis, pulmonary embolism, and deep-vein thrombosis. The D-dimer level was also measured. The team ruled out …
