[Morphologic verification in computer tomography of the brain]

A comparison of computer-aided tomograms of the brain with the results of morphological examinations of the latter in 51 autopsy cases was carried out. The causes of the death were brain infarctions, hemorrhages, and tumours. It was found that roentgenological diagnosis of cerebral infarctions entailed no difficulties, if the examinations were performed within 24 hours after the disease onset and the focus size was over 1 to 2 cm. There were some difficulties in diagnosing small foci in the brain stem and in the cortex of brain hemispheres as well as infarctions with hemorrhages irrespectively of their size and location. The diagnoses of cerebral hemorrhages were rather precise in the early stages of hemorrhagic strokes, but extremely difficult later, in a definite stage of the hemorrhagic focus organization when computer-aided tomography revealed densities characteristic for unaffected brain. A high diagnostic efficiency of the computer-aided tomography was noted in brain tumours. Certain difficulties sometimes arose in determining the character of the tumour in cases of multiple of small-size foci. The morphological verification of the results of the computer-aided brain tomography is of a decisive importance for developing roentgenomorphological criteria for diagnosing CNS pathologies with the aid of this method, and contributes to further improvement of the latter.