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Aim: To determine the potential effect of changes to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines to the use of computed tomography (CT) in the assessment of suspected paediatric cervical spine (c-spine) injury.Material and Methods: A 5 year retrospective study was conducted of c-spine imaging in paediatric (<10 years) patients presenting following blunt trauma at a Level 1 trauma centre in London. All patients under the age of 10 years who underwent any imaging of the c-spine following blunt trauma were included. Clinical data relating to the presenting signs and symptoms were obtained from the retrospective review of electronic records and paper notes. This was then applied to the previous NICE guideline (CG56) and to the new NICE guideline (CG176). Patients with incomplete data were excluded.Results: Two hundred and seventy-eight patients <10 years underwent imaging of the c-spine following blunt trauma. Two hundred and seventy (97.12%) examinations had complete data and were included in further analysis. One hundred and forty-nine (55.19%) met the criteria for a CT of the c-spine under NICE CG56, whereas 252 (93.33%) met the updated NICE CG176 criteria for c-spine CT. Five (1.85%) patients had a c-spine injury and met the criteria under both CG56 and CG176 NICE guidelines.Conclusion: Recent changes to NICE Head Injury Guidelines relating to radiological assessment of paediatric c-spine following blunt trauma are likely to result in an increased usage of CT as the initial radiological investigation over plain radiographs, without an apparent increase in specificity in the present series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: To estimate the probability of malignancy in small pulmonary nodules (PNs) based on clinical and radiological characteristics in a non-screening population that includes patients with a prior history of malignancy using three validated models.Materials and Methods: Retrospective data on clinical and radiological characteristics was collected from the medical records of 702 patients (379 men, 323 women; range 19-94 years) with PNs ≤12 mm in diameter at a single centre. The final diagnosis was compared to the probability of malignancy calculated by one of three models (Mayo, VA, and McWilliams). Model accuracy was assessed by receiver operating characteristics (ROC). The models were calibrated by comparing predicted and observed rates of malignancy.Results: The area under the ROC curve (AUC) was highest for the McWilliams model (0.82; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.78-0.91) and lowest for the Mayo model (0.58; 95% CI: 0.55-0.59). The VA model had an AUC of (0.62; 95% CI: 0.47-0.64). Performance of the models was significantly lower than that in the published literature.Conclusions: The accuracy of the three models is lower in a non-screening population with a high prevalence of prior malignancy compared to the papers that describe their development. To the authors' knowledge, this is the largest study to validate predictive models for PNs in a non-screening clinically referred patient population, and has potential implications for the implementation of predictive models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]