How are traumatic aortic injuries diagnosed?
Clinical suspicion or chest radiographic findings should be enough to send a patient with an unstable condition to surgery. If the patient’s condition is relatively stable, most authorities now recommend CTA, preferably with a multidetector computed tomography (MDCT) scanner. Catheter angiography, previously the mainstay of diagnosis, is now most useful for problem solving when CTA is nondiagnostic or equivocal.