Abstract:
The plain chest radiograph is the basic tool in diagnosis and follows up patients
in general times with inexpensive imaging and to demonstrate pathological lesions.
This retrospective descriptive research aim to investigate the usefulness of the chest xray
in diagnosing lung cancer and the characteristics of histological lung cancer from
the film chest x-rays of patients with lung cancer in Siriraj Hospital, 1998-2004, there
were 138 cases (squamous cell carcinoma 35 cases; adenocarcinoma 86 cases; large
cell carcinoma 3 cases; and small cell carcinoma 14 cases).
Results revealed that small cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma were
most frequent in males and adenocarcinoma was most frequent in females (p<0.05).
Then, squamous cell carcinoma and small cell carcinoma were most frequent in tumor
size in diameter more than 4 cm and adenocarcinoma was most frequent in tumor size
in diameter less than 4 cm (p<0.05). And then, none squamous cell carcinoma found
in cases of the pleural effusion presented with absented infiltration but found instead
of small cell carcinoma and adenocarcinoma which there was significantly (p<0.05).
The accuracy of chest x-ray for evaluated squamous cell carcinoma, adenocarcinoma,
large cell carcinoma, and small cell carcinoma were 69% (95% confidence interval =
54 to 84%), 55% (95% confidence interval = 44 to 66%), 0% and 50% (95%
confidence interval = 24 to 76%), respectively. Predictive value were 44% (95%
confidence interval = 28 to 60%), 78% (95% confidence interval = 69 to 87%), 0%,
and 57% (95% confidence interval = 8 to 58%), respectively.