Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-29-2024

Identifier

DOI: 10.1186/s40644-024-00750-3; PMCID: PMC11360734

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Patients treated for cancer have a higher incidence of focal liver lesions than the general population and there is often concern for a malignant etiology. This can result in patient, caregiver and physician anxiety and is managed by a "wait and watch" approach, or immediate additional imaging, or biopsy, depending on the degree of clinical concern. Because it is a low-cost, easily accessible, radiation and sedation free modality, we investigated the value of contrast enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) to accurately distinguish benign from malignant liver lesions in patients treated for childhood malignancies.

METHODS: We performed an IRB approved retrospective study of 68 subjects who were newly diagnosed, on treatment or off treatment for a pediatric malignancy and had liver lesions discovered on CT, MRI or non-contrast ultrasound and subsequently underwent CEUS between September 2013 and September 2021. Two experienced pediatric radiologists and a radiology trainee, blinded to the etiology of the liver lesions, independently reviewed the CEUS examinations and categorized lesions as benign, indeterminate, or malignant. The reference standard was biopsy for 19 lesions and clinical follow-up for 49. The sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive value, and diagnostic accuracy of CEUS were calculated using only the benign and malignant CEUS classifications. Inter-reviewer agreement was assessed by Cohen's kappa statistic.

RESULTS: There were 26 males and 42 females, mean age, 14.9 years (range, 1-52 years). Fifty subjects were off therapy, twelve receiving treatment, and six with newly diagnosed cancer. By the reference standard, 59 (87%) lesions were benign and 9 (13%) were malignant. Sensitivities of CEUS for the three reviewers ranged from 83 to 100% (95% CI, 35.9-100%), specificities from 93.1 to 96.0% (95% CI, 83.5-99.6%), PPV 60.0-71.4% (95% CI, 29.0-96.3%), NPV 98.0-100% (95% CI, 89.2-100%) and accuracy from 93.8 to 94.6% (95% CI, 85.1-99.7%). The kappa statistic for agreement between the two experienced radiologists was moderate at 0.58.

CONCLUSIONS: CEUS is highly accurate in distinguishing benign from malignant etiologies of liver lesions in patients treated for pediatric malignancies.

Journal Title

Cancer Imaging

Volume

24

Issue

1

First Page

115

Last Page

115

MeSH Keywords

Humans; Male; Female; Child; Ultrasonography; Retrospective Studies; Child, Preschool; Liver Neoplasms; Contrast Media; Infant; Adolescent; Young Adult; Adult; Sensitivity and Specificity

Keywords

Contrast enhanced ultrasound; Focal liver lesions; Pediatric malignancy

Comments

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Publisher's Link: https://cancerimagingjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40644-024-00750-3

Download

Share

COinS