[Evaluation of agreement between clinical and pathomorphologic diagnosis of pulmonary embolism].
The rate of both: false-positive and false-negative diagnoses of pulmonary embolism (PE) is high. To determine the accuracy of the ante-mortem diagnosis of PE we reviewed 78 autopsies and compared the clinical and pathological diagnoses in that group. In 64 cases PE was diagnosed clinically: in 43 it was confirmed by autopsy (67%). In 21 cases (33%) the clinical diagnoses were false-positive. There were 57 pathological diagnoses altogether: in 14 cases (25%) the clinical diagnoses were false-negative. Among falsely diagnosed patients, the diagnoses of myocardial infarction, pneumonia and malignancy were most frequent. We tried to find some distinctive features separating the cases in the subgroups. Among them venous diseases were more frequent in PE than in falsely diagnosed patients.