Keywords:
Genital / Reproductive system male, Ultrasound, Elastography, Ultrasound-Colour Doppler, Diagnostic procedure, Comparative studies, Statistics, Endocrine disorders
Authors:
A. Aslan1, A. Aktan2, A. Buz2, Y. O. Danacioglu2, I. caymaz2, B. Erol2, A. Kabaalioglu2; 1İstanbul/TR, 2Istanbul/TR
DOI:
10.1594/ecr2018/C-1957
Aims and objectives
Introduction:
Male hypogonadism is a condition described as diminished activity of the testicles,
which leads inadequate secretion of sex hormones particularly testosterone.
Male hypogonadism is subdivided into two main groups,
as known as,
primary and secondary hypogonadism.
Primary hypogonadism indicates insufficiency of testosteron due to a testicular defect,
on the other hand,
secondary hypogonadism ,also called hypogonadotropic hypogonadism,
is associated with the decreased stimulating signal to testes from hypothalamus or pituitary gland(1).
Wide availability,
low cost,
real time screening and avoidance of radiation exposure make sonography (US) the modality of choice to examine testicular pathologies(2).
In spite of all advantages,
US is sometimes inadequate for final diagnosis.
Additional informations provided by elastography improve accuracy of the diagnosis while evaluating testicular pathologies.
Basically,
sonoelastography discriminates different tissues according to their elasticity and stiffness characteristics(2,3).Soft tissues are tend to easily deform under external compression,
on the contrary,
when the tissue gets harder,
it gets difficult to distort the structure with an extrinsic pressure(4-7).
The main difference of these two methods,
SWE and RTE,
is that,
in SWE,
ultrasound pulses are generating shearwaves which are emitting by the tissue consequently,
however in RTE,
echo signals at the time of compression are measured against before the compression which makes the modality more operator dependent(2,8,9).
In our current study we aimed to present the sonographic appearance of testicular structures,
shearwave elastography(SWE) and strain-real time elastography features(RTE) of testicles in hypogonadotropic hypogonadism patients.
Also we compared SWE and RTE findings of two different observers to estimate the reproducibility of the both methods for the assesment of secondary hypogonadism.