Medical Tests & Procedures Archive

What is the test?

Tonometry is a test to measure pressure in your eyeball. High pressure inside the eye is caused by a disease called glaucoma, which can damage your vision if it is not treated.

How do I prepare for the test?

Remove any contact lenses. Tell your doctor if you have an eye infection or other type of eye problem.

What is the test?

Video-assisted thoracic surgery (VATS) is a type of surgery that enables doctors to view the inside of the chest cavity after making only very small incisions. The doctor can examine the outside surface of the lung and the inner surface of the chest wall through a camera attached to the scope. Abnormal appearing areas on the lung surface can be biopsied.

VATS also provides relatively easy access to taking a biopsy of the lung.  This may be needed to diagnose the cause of abnormalities on a chest x-ray or to determine the specific infectious agent responsible for pneumonia that is not getting better on antibiotics.

What is the test?

A wire localization biopsy is a type of surgical biopsy.

Sometimes an abnormal area will be seen on the mammogram that clearly should be tested for cancer or completely removed from the breast, but this area is not easily felt as a lump on examination. The mammography department can help your surgeon to find the area more easily by using a technique called "wire localization."

What Is It?

X-rays are waves of electromagnetic radiation that are used to create images of organs and other structures inside the body. X-rays have a very short wavelength. As they penetrate the body, they are absorbed in different amounts by different body tissues. For example, bones are dense and absorb X-rays very well, but soft tissues (skin, fat, muscle) allow more X-rays to pass through. The result is an X-ray shadow on a film or fluorescent screen, where images of bones appear white, while shadows of soft tissues appear as various shades of gray.

In some forms of X-rays, a chemical called contrast medium is given to the patient to help outline a specific body area on X-ray film. This chemical can be swallowed, given as an enema or injected into a vein. The contrast medium appears white on the X-ray film, and can produce a sharp outline of structures such as the digestive tract and the paths of blood vessels.

News briefs

About half of all people in the United States living with a diagnosis of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) are age 50 or older. But new data from the CDC suggest most Americans have never been tested for the virus (which causes AIDS, the late-stage phase of HIV infection). According to the June 28, 2019, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, less than 40% of people in the United States have had an HIV test, even though the CDC recommends routine testing at least once for everyone age 13 to 64. The CDC notes that older adults sometimes aren't tested for HIV because they don't consider themselves at risk for infection or because their health care providers don't offer them the test. Older people may also mistake late-stage HIV symptoms, such as weight loss and frequent illness, for signs of normal aging. Those symptoms occur because HIV attacks the body's immune system. But a delay in diagnosis allows the virus to cause more damage. That's unfortunate, since medications can keep the infection from progressing.

If you haven't had an HIV test, talk to your doctor about whether it's right for you, no matter your age, especially if you are sexually active or have had more than one sex partner.

Research we're watching

With some smartphones, you can unlock the phone simply by showing your face. One day, a short video of your face may do far more — maybe even measure your blood pressure.

That's the premise of a novel smartphone-based technology described in the August issue of Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging. For the study, researchers took two-minute videos of 1,328 Chinese and Canadian adults, using an iPhone equipped with transdermal optical imaging. The software measures blood pressure by detecting blood flow changes in a person's face. When compared with readings taken using a traditional blood pressure cuff, the video blood pressure readings were about 95% accurate.

Active surveillance and watchful waiting are the most conservative — and increasingly popular — approaches to prostate cancer management. Is one of these right for you?

Over the years, the outcome for prostate cancer has turned out to be better than expected for many men.

While prostate cancer is quite common, the risk of dying from the disease is low, even without treatment. In fact, most diagnosed men will die from something else, like heart disease. Even so, prostate cancer remains the second leading cause of cancer deaths (after lung cancer) in men, according to the American Cancer Society.

On call

Q. I suddenly developed low back pain for the first time. My doctor said I did not need an x-ray or other imaging test. Is that normal and are there any situations when a test would be needed?

A. Yes, your doctor is following the current guidelines. Unless you have other symptoms in addition to low back pain, an x-ray, CT scan, or MRI is not likely to be helpful. But it could cause unnecessary worry while waiting for the results and cost you some money if it's not covered by your health insurance. In addition, many people have "false-positive" results in which an abnormality is detected but turns out to be harmless.

Your blood pressure is one of the best ways to measure overall health and possible risk factors. Do you know your numbers?

There are many important health markers: cholesterol levels, blood sugar levels, weight — to name but a few. But men often fail to use one of the most important: blood pressure.

"Your blood pressure is one of the easiest and simplest measurements and can tell you so much about your current and possible future health," says Dr. Randall Zusman, director of the division of hypertension for Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital's Corrigan Minehan Heart Center. "Yet most people don't know their number or check it on a regular basis, so they may not be doing everything they need to lower their risk of a heart attack or stroke."

In the journals

A new study found that a simple blood test can detect beta-amyloid protein buildup in a person's brain years before Alzheimer's disease symptoms appear. The results were published online Aug. 1, 2019, by the journal Neurology.

High amounts of beta-amyloid can clump together and form plaques on the brain, which is strongly associated with Alzheimer's disease. Other research has found that amyloid plaques can appear as early as 20 years before the first sign of Alzheimer's symptoms, such as cognitive decline and memory loss.