Ultrasonography in the diagnosis of acute appendicitis

During a 10 month period high resolution sonography was used in the evaluation of 80 patients with an equivocal clinical diagnosis of acute appendicitis. The sonographic findings were correlated with the surgical and pathological outcome in 53 cases and with clinical follow-up in the remainder. This technique was found to be accurate in the diagnosis of acute appeudicitis with a specificity of 95%, a sensitivity of 86% and accuracy of 91%. The predicitve value of a positive test was 93%, that of negative test was 89%. The results showed that high resoluion sonography is indicated to establish the diagnosis of acute appendicitis in patients with equivocal clinical findings