Keywords:
Liver, Ultrasound, Contrast agent-other, Metastases
Authors:
O. Catalano1, A. Nunziata2, E. de Lutio di Castelguidone1, G. Nasti1, F. Tatangelo1, A. Petrillo1; 1Naples/IT, 2Ercolano/IT
DOI:
10.1594/ecr2013/C-1606
Results
Results
CEUS was always completed,
with an adequate assessment of all lesions.
At time 0 there were 1-8 lesions (mean 3) per patient.
On a patient basis,
CEUS correlated with MDCT in all cases (100%) (Fig. 2).
Thirty-five subjects (89.7%) were diagnosed as responders (20 completely and 15 partially) both at CEUS and MDCT,
and consequently underwent surgery.
Four patients showed disease progression and were regarded as not responders (10.3%).
The correlation between pre-surgical imaging and post-surgical pathology is shown in Fig. 3.
Responding lesions typically showed decreased enhancement and loss of the enhancing rim,
as early findings,
and reduction of lesion size and sharp margins late findings (Fig. 4 and Fig. 5).
Three responding patients showed punctuate calcifications as a late sign,
better recognizable with MDCT (Fig. 6).
A hepatic post-surgical recurrence was found in 29/35 patients (as a resection margin recurrence in 3 cases and as new heterotopic lesions in the remaining 26 cases) (Fig. 7 and Fig. 8).
Study Limitations
Our study has a number of limitations,
including the small number of patients,
the lack of quantitative assessment of lesions’ enhancement,
and the limited length of patients follow-up.