In their study, Dr. Syed Arsalan Raza and colleagues evaluated 50 patients with hepatocellular carcinoma and venous thrombosis detected on CT or MR with contrast ultrasound. Two independent readers recorded the enhancement features of the venous thrombosis and diagnosed it as benign or malignant.
For malignant thrombosis, the sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value in differentiating malignant from benign thrombosis were 100%, 83%, 95%, and 100% for reader 1 and 100%, 92%, 97%, and 100% for reader 2, respectively.
Based on the results, Raza's team concluded that contrast-enhanced ultrasound can distinguish between malignant and benign venous thrombosis associated with hepatocellular carcinoma with high diagnostic accuracy.
