Pleural Effusions and Disease.

Malignant pleural Effusion and CT

Review Article from Oxford in 2017 ¹

Sign	Sensitivity	Average	Specificity	Mean
Nodular Pleural Thickening	18-53%	30%	87-100%	95%
Mediastinal Pleural Thickening	14-74%	50%	68-97%	92%
Parietal thickening >1cm	7-47%	25%	64-98%	90%
Circumferential thickening	7-54%	30%	63-100%	90%

But circumferential thickening is less specific if there is a pleural effusion.

Also Real world study quoting for CT as 'malignant'² - Sensitivity = 68%, - Specificity = 78%, - PPV = 80% - NPV = 65%

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1. Hallifax RJ. et al, Resp Med 124 (2017) 88-89 ↩

2. R.J. Hallifax, et al., Role of CT in assessing pleural malignancy prior to thoracoscopy, Thorax 70 (2) (2015) 192e193. ↩