Dr. Dirk-Andre Clevert and colleagues compared the performance of the two techniques and will present their findings in this Wednesday afternoon session.
The study included 132 patients who underwent both CEUS and multislice CT follow-up exams after endovascular aortic aneurysm repair. Clevert's group gathered 200 exam pairs from the total cohort.
How did contrast ultrasound perform? Its true-positive rate for finding endoleaks was 42%, the false-positive rate was 4%, the true-negative rate was 52%, and the false-negative rate was 2% -- for sensitivity of 97% and specificity of 93%, comparable to multislice CT.
The findings suggest that contrast-enhanced ultrasound should be considered as an alternative to multislice CT for detecting endoleaks after EVAR, the group concluded.
