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The past year has not improved the prospects for ultrasound, according to Lorenzo Derchi, MD, who chaired the session at ECR 2010 dedicated to future direction of ultrasound & opened the discussion.

There are further advances with contrast agents, volume scans and image enhancement techniques, Lorenzo Derchi said.

At the session he repeated his provocation that the relationship between ultrasound and radiology has not been an easy love story, and went on to decry the continual focus on ultrasound techiques to the detriment of the development of ultrasound as a medical profession.

As a result, the routine services of ultrasound are guaranteed, but for young doctors it is only seen as a mature technique with no room for advancement, he said.

Ultrasound is increasingly introduced to clinical practice by non-radiologists and as for its future direction, it seems doomed to be regarded as only a stethoscope for the majority of practitioners.

Dr. Claudon with the Radiology group at the University of Nancy in France, then indirectly demonstrated the fast development of this technique by asking for a show of hands from the audience for those currently using contrast agents in examinations.

After a review of studies and cases for applications of ultrasound contrast in liver and kidney, Dr. Claudon concluded that this technique's principal application is as a complement to contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CE- CT ) or magnetic resonance imaging (CE- MRI ) in pretreatment and that it is emerging as a major tool for follow on studies for vaidation of therapies and especially for recurrence in cancer patients.

Moving into another emerging technology in ultrasound, Giorgio Rizzatto, MD, with the University of Udine, took on the question Elastography: Clinical tool or toy? On the way to giving his answer, Dr. Rizzatto sounded a grim note for the compression technique that pioneered the advances of elastography for measuring tissue stiffness, saying compression is over, with the advance of new technologies that produce a shear wave to reliably and reproducibly quantify the extent of tissue stifness.

Noting that current evidence is crushed by the initial focus on breast studies, elastography holds promise for a braod range of clinical applications for eyes, skin, muscles, liver prostate, vessels and the heart.

Dr. Rizzatto concluded that elsatography will prove to be a clinical tool, and not a toy, for routine practice, screenings and monitoring patient conditions.

Source: ECR

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