The Diagnosis of Pulmonary Embolism

Although clinical diagnosis of pulmonary embolism (PE) is not sufficiently reliable to determine management, it is valuable for stratifying patients into high, intermediate, and low clinical suspicion of embolism. Clinical assessment can then be combined with lung scanning to identify groups of patients with a sufficiently high or low probability of PE that a decision to anticoagulate or withhold therapy can be made. Approximately half of …