Heat-induced necrosis after bronchial thermoplasty: a new concern?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Bronchial thermoplasty (BT) is an endoscopic procedure for the treatment of severe refractory asthma, based on the local airways delivery of radio-frequency at 65 °C. Several controlled clinical studies demonstrated the effectiveness of BT on clinical outcomes, particularly the reduction of asthma exacerbations. During procedure or shortly after, significant but transient respiratory adverse events have been reported. CASE REPORT: We describe the case of a male, caucasian, 56-year-old, non-smoker patient with non-allergic severe asthma. A few days after the second BT session performed in the left lower lobe, persistent haemoptysis appeared requiring patient hospitalization. A chest CT scan showed mild varicoid bronchiectasis and distal parenchymal infiltrate in the basal anterior segment of the left lower lobe. At fibreoptic bronchoscopy two small nodular neoformations were observed in sub-segmental areas of the same lobe. Histological examination showed mild non-specific inflammation of bronchial mucosa, and some large fragments of peribronchial pulmonary parenchyma with an area of haemorrhagic necrosis. The patient was treated empirically with co-amoxiclav, azithromycin and prednisone. A new chest CT showed a complete resolution of the parenchymal opacity. Finally, the patient underwent the third session of BT, without recurrence of haemoptysis or radiological changes. DISCUSSION: Bronchial thermoplasty is a generally safe procedure. To our knowledge this is the first report of necrosis of the treated bronchus and haemoptysis complicating BT after the second session. The pulmonary damage was most likely determined by a thermal shock induced by BT. One hypothesis could be a structural fragility of the treated bronchus, possibly related to bronchiectasis. A technical malfunction of the BT controller or the catheter, causing an excessive energy delivery could not be excluded. Adverse events following BT deserve particular attention but should not discourage clinicians from the application of this promising procedure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".