THE AIRWAY DIMENSION IN ORDINARY HUMAN LUNGS - A STANDARDIZED MORPHOMETRY OF LUNG SECTIONS

In chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, obscurities remain in the de gree of obstruction and its distribution in the airway tree. To overco me these obscurities, a technique was introduced to estimate the origi nal diameter of an airway in lung sections; this technique involved me asurement of the accompanying artery. Ordinary lungs had been obtained at autopsy from 17 deceased patients of various ages; from these lung s, 695 pairs of airways and pulmonary arteries were subjected to compu ter-assisted measurement of their diameters: the whole range of airway s from the segmental bronchi to the respiratory bronchioles was sample d, We proved that a log-log regression existed between the diameter of an airway and that of the pulmonary artery; this regression was suffi ciently close to allow one to estimate the diameter of an airway from the diameter of the pulmonary artery, even in chronic obstructive pulm onary disease, in which airways are usually strongly stenosed or dilat ed. In an additional study of three lungs with various types of chroni c obstructive pulmonary disease, the diameters of the pulmonary arteri es were shown to remain essentially unaffected.