Using Computed Tomographic Scanning to Advance Understanding of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is a syndrome that encompasses a variety of pathologies and underlying mechanisms. Progress in understanding mechanisms, testing therapies, and identifying contributing genetic factors will be facilitated by the availability of techniques to characterize patients with respect to the nature and extent of both parenchymal and airway diseases. This review discusses the applicability of computed tomographic scan analysis to this problem. The current state of the field is briefly reviewed and future directions for the field are proposed.