University of Alabama at Birmingham Aug 12 2025 The diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, is improved by incorporating CT lung imaging and respiratory symptoms. This fresh, multidimensional approach better identifies patients who are at risk of poor respiratory outcomes, while ruling out those who have airflow obstruction without respiratory symptoms or structural lung disease, Surya Bhatt, M.D., and colleagues report in the Journal of the American Medical Association .