Bedside Evaluation of Pulmonary Embolism by Saline Contrast Electrical Impedance Tomography Method: A Prospective Observational Study

The electrical impedance tomography (EIT), a noninvasive, radiationfree, bedside lung imaging method, has gained attention in the diagnosis of acute respiratory failure (ARF), pleural effusion, and pneumothorax (1, 2) and monitoring of regional lung ventilation in mechanically ventilated patients (3, 4).Besides, EIT was proposed to quantitatively assess regional lung perfusion with saline bolus injection, which was validated in small animal studies (5,6).We demonstrated the clinical use of this method to detect acute pulmonary embolism (PE) in a recent case (7).To further confirm the feasibility of bedside detection of acute PE, we conducted a larger prospective observational clinical study using EIT.