Abstract
As yet, the functional abnormalities of patients with various types of COPD have not been correlated with changes of airways in systematized pathological studies. The delay in this aspect of research is attributable to the lack, on the part of pathologists, of techniques for evaluating the distribution and degree of airway obstruction, tasks in which one cannot resort to the techniques of stereology. In this lecture I reviewed some recent attempts of our team to introduce new techniques of morphology : computer-aided 3-D structural analysis which aims at visualizing the distribution of obstruction, and airway morphometry that allows a comparison of airway diameter with its original state. The methods were effective in defining the exact place of obstruction in the airway tree in several types of COPD including diffuse panbronchiolitis and bronchobronchiolitis obliterans. Also, they contributed much to a better understanding of a type of COPD which, though poorly documented by pathologists, tumed out to correspond to what has been called small airways disease despite the lack of a firm pathological definition.
