Dear Ultrasound Insider,
Whether imaging is needed for abdominal, pediatric, women’s, or chest imaging applications, ultrasound can do it all. That is, if you ask the researchers.
For instance, a team in China has developed a nomogram model based on O-RADS ultrasound findings and other indicators that can predict malignancy risk in ovarian masses. The group highlighted the model’s high performance in a study that makes this edition’s featured story.
In other news, ultrasound’s interventional utility was on display in a couple of November studies. Authors out of Lahey Hospital & Medical Center in Massachusetts found that ultrasound-guided nerve blocks are safe for pain management when performed by emergency clinicians. And researchers from the Chinese PLA General Hospital in Beijing reported that ultrasound-guided thermal ablation is a safe and effective option for patients with papillary thyroid carcinoma.
Ultrasound also continues to be studied in breast imaging settings as an adjunct modality alongside mammography. Recent studies demonstrated that nonmass breast lesion characteristics on ultrasound exams can be considered suspicious for malignancy, automated breast ultrasound is useful in low-resource settings, and ChatGPT has modest accuracy when assigning BI-RADS scores for mammograms and breast ultrasound exams.
Investigators also proved that ultrasound may very well be the Swiss army knife of imaging modalities. Studies showed how ultrasound can be used for evaluating many body parts and organs with and without AI assistance. These include how a deep-learning method using endoscopic ultrasound images could detect pancreatic neuroendocrine neoplasms, how an ultrasound technique can detect and stage acute cellular rejection in liver transplant patients, and how an ultrasound test can identify most ovarian cancers in postmenopausal women.
Is there any ultrasound research you feel should be covered? Perhaps you’d like to see more studies focus on lung imaging or contrast imaging.
Either way, keep visiting our Ultrasound content area for the latest news involving the modality, and feel free to drop us a line! Also, be sure to check out AuntMinnie.com’s coverage of ultrasound and other imaging modalities at RSNA 2024 in Chicago.
