Dear Ultrasound Insider,
Contrast-enhanced ultrasound can be highly sensitive for characterizing indeterminate kidney lesions. Specificity can suffer, however, when the modality is used by inexperienced readers and in patients with advanced chronic kidney disease, according to researchers from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill.
The UNC team shared the results in a presentation at the recent American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine (AIUM) annual meeting. Our coverage is the subject of this newsletter's Insider Exclusive, which you can access before our regular members.
Other stories from AIUM 2017 include a report on how machine-learning technology shows promise for reading breast ultrasound exams. After training a machine-learning algorithm with quantitative grayscale and color Doppler features, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found that their machine-learning algorithm achieved high sensitivity and specificity for breast cancer. How did they do it? Click here to learn more.
Also, a team from the Cleveland Clinic shared why musculoskeletal (MSK) ultrasound can be a definitive advanced imaging modality in most cases. In a four-year retrospective analysis, the researchers concluded that MRI exams performed after MSK ultrasound were nearly always concordant with ultrasound results and rarely changed clinical management. Click here for all of the details.
You can also find out how the U.S. government is preparing for the potential re-emergence of the Zika virus.
In other featured news, the American College of Radiology Thyroid Imaging Reporting and Data System (TI-RADS) committee has recently published its new thyroid nodule risk stratification model. Although the algorithm is similar in many ways to current thyroid nodule imaging and management recommendations from other medical societies, it does have some key differences. Read all about them by clicking here.
Researchers have also found that a new quantitative spectral Doppler ultrasound measure can accurately detect liver transplant hepatic arterial stenosis, potentially reducing the number of unnecessary angiography procedures performed on these patients. They shared their results in a paper published in the April issue of the Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine; you can access our report by clicking here.
Finally, ultrasound elastography shows promise for discriminating between metastatic and nonmetastatic cervical lymph nodes, according to a preliminary study by a group from Changhai Hospital in Shanghai, China. Find out more by clicking here.
Is there a topic you'd like to see covered your Ultrasound Community? As always, please feel free to drop me a line.
