Sunday, December 1 | 1:20 p.m.-1:30 p.m. | S4-SSMK02-3 | Room E353B
Audience members will bear witness to how multimodal photoacoustic ultrasound imaging improves rheumatoid arthritis assessment.
In his talk, Fajin Dong, MD, from The Second Clinical Medical College at Jinan University in China will share how this modality can outperform power color Doppler ultrasound, especially when it comes to small vessels in thickened synovium and inflamed tendon sheaths.
The researchers sought to study the correlation between multimodal photoacoustic ultrasound imaging scores and rheumatoid arthritis disease activity. They also evaluated the modality’s clinical applicability in managing the autoimmune disease and compared results to those of power color Doppler ultrasound.
The study included 111 rheumatoid arthritis patients who underwent imaging exams for seven small joints on their clinically dominant side. The team calculated cumulative scores for both modalities across the joints and measured relative oxygen saturation (So2) values of inflamed joints on the clinically dominant side.
The study included an analysis of 777 small joints. The researchers found that the photoacoustic sum scores showed a strong correlation with standard clinical scores for rheumatoid arthritis (p < 0.001 for all measures). Additionally, these correlations proved to be superior to those of the color Doppler sum scores (p < 0.001).
The researchers also observed significant differences in patients with higher photoacoustic sum scores in the erythrocyte sedimentation rate (p < 0.01) and swollen joint count 28 (p < 0.01) between hypoxia and intermediate groups.
“Notably, patients in the hypoxia group exhibited higher clinical scores in certain clinical indices,” they wrote.
Attend this session to find out more about the study.
