Purpose
US is considered the modality of choice for neck soft-tissue examination,
image guided neck interventional procedure and in particular FNA or core biopsies.
Even if standard B-mode US examinations can be integrated with advanced imaging techniques such as color-Doppler,
contrast-enhanced ultrasound and elastosonography,
tissue characterization by US still relies mainly on morphological characteristics.
On the other hand,
Scintiscan,
PETCT and MRI can provide valuable specific functional information which is useful for detecting pathologies.
In particular,
while Scintiscan is commonly used in the diagnostic work-up of...
Methods and materials
For the present study a MyLabTwice ultrasound scanner equipped with anelectromagnetic (EM)tracking system,
2D navigation with BodyMap and 3D Virtual Navigator hardware and software,
was used (ESAOTE,
Italy).
BodyMap is an EMtracked technology for 2D Navigation,
that combines US with pre-acquired 2D DICOM images,
used to show the real-time position of the US probe with respect to any secondaryimages,
such asscintiscan.
While the probe is moving,
showing the real-time ultrasound frames,
the probe position (indicated by a green circle) is automatically over-imposed on the reference...
Results
All co-registrations were successfully carried out (Fig 5).
Overall,
operators reported that using 2D navigation with BM or 3D VN resulted in an increased confidence in localization of pathologic findings in 76% of the procedures with an inter-observer agreement of 97%.
If only target lesions with a maximum US diameter not more than 20 mm were considered ( 11 cases in total) the increased confidence and inter-observer agreement were respectively 94% and 100% (Fig 6-7).
The average time required for the start-up of the cognitive...
Conclusion
3D VN and 2D Navigation with BMusing an EM tracking system are reliable techniques.
When compared with the cognitive approach,
they resulted in an increased operator confidence in US localization of abnormal or pathologic functional findings on scintiscan and PETCT.
Operators’ confidence further increased in the cases with challenging small lesions.
Inter-observer agreement resulted to be substantial for all cases,
or nearly perfect for cases with small target lesion,
making the techniques robust.
As regard the time required for the set-up of the navigation modality,...
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