PICO: De rol van elastografie bij testisafwijkingen

Abstract

Elastography can provide additional information concerning the strain of (testicular) abnormalities, which makes malignancy more or less likely. In this PICO we compared elastography to conventional grey-scale ultrasound in patients with testicular abnormalities for confirming or excluding malignancy. Unfortunately, there is very little literature available; only four articles. These studies showed that elastography can provide additional information, and the study of Aigner et al. found an improvement of specificity of 6 % (75 % for conventional ultrasound versus 81 % for elastography). Furthermore, elastography is rather easy to conduct and does not take much time. However, no firm conclusions can be drawn, due to the limited amount and quality of the available literature. Nevertheless, we believe elastography can have additional value for testicular abnormalities, but further research is needed.