THE FUNCTIONAL AND BRONCHOGRAPHIC EVALUATION OF POSTMORTEM HUMAN LUNGS.

Special techniques for the functional evaluation of postmortem lungs have been described recently by several authors (1-6). The importance of postmortem pulmonary function tests is to provide physiologic measurements to correlate with the pulmonary pathology. Pulmonary function tests performed during life are almost never available on asymptomatic patients; furthermore, tests on patients with symptoms of obstructive disease are often performed months or years before death. Bronchography for the study of abnormal airway structure and collapse on expiration is rarely possible during life in severely ill patients and, again, is almost never performed on asymptomatic persons who die shortly thereafter. The present study is an extension of the work of Pratt and co-workers (2, 3) and Rosenzweig and Filley ( 4). Special emphasis has been placed on postmortem bronchography as a means of evaluating airway dynamics and observing premature and excessive airway collapse in patients with chronic obstructive bronchopulmonary disease. Attempts have been made to develop a reliable means of measuring the postmortem 1second vital capacity (FEV1) and correlating this measurement, when possible, with the FEV1 obtained during life. These observations on airway structure and function have been related to the clinical features of each case as well as to the histologic findings at postmortem examinations.