Diagnostic value of ultrasonic elastography and conventional ultrasound in differentiating the benign and malignant hepatic tumors / 中华超声影像学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To evaluate the diagnostic value of conventional ultrasound and ultrasonic elastography (UE) in differentiating benign and malignant hepatic lesions.Methods One hundred and forty-five patients with 159 hepatic tumors were included in the study.Conventional ultrasound scan and UE were performed on each patient.Pathological results were as the golden standard.The diagnostic performance of the 2 methods were evaluated with receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and the interobserver agreements were analysed.Results A better interobserver agreement was achieved in UE (κ =0.325 at conventional ultrasound versus κ =0.782 at UE).The area under ROC curve of conventional ultrasound,ultrasonic elastography and the combination of both methods were 0.76,0.77 and 0.87,respectively.After the combination of the 2 methods,the sensitivity and accuracy could be enhanced significantly ( P ＜0.05).Conclusions Conventional ultrasound combined with UE may be more helpful in differentiating malignant from benign hepatic tumors.