by
Brendon Nafziger, DOTmed News Associate Editor | December 07, 2009
According to Debain, in preliminary clinical studies involving 254 patients, doctors' palpations appeared to line up with elastography scorings. "Shear-wave elastography is directly related to clinical palpation," she says.
While it's too early to give results, Debain says the study, ultimately expected to involve 2,300 patients at 17 sites around the world, should be written up by next fall. For now, she can say that from what they've seen, the ROC curve, a tool which helps judge the signal-to-noise ratio of a test, gives their system between .88 and .93 (out of one) for accuracy, depending on how many shear wave elements they add.
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"If we stick with the ROC curve for accuracy, we will go up every time we add a shear wave feature," Debain says, but the jury is out until the results are seen next year.
Elastograms for livers, too
At the show, Philips also announced its own works-in-progress shear-wave ultrasound device, which currently is being used primarily for liver research.
Because it's not practical to perform biopsies to screen people at risk for cirrhosis or liver diseases, due to risks associated with liver biopsies, doctors are on the lookout for imaging tools that will help them identify people with mild fibrosis, or tissue-hardening, early, before symptoms show up. It might be possible to treat them before lasting damage sets in. At least, that's the hope, and a shear-wave elastography device could be useful in detecting that faint fibrotic tissue in early onset liver disease.
Not much is known about the results with the Philips device so far, but in a statement released at the show, they said that early studies with an experimental elastography device were able to accurately measure elasticity of tissue. "Based on the results of these studies," reads the statement, "the experimental system has been modified in preparation for further clinical research into shear-wave elastography.
Whatever the results of this or SuperSonic's clinical studies, elastography's future appears to be stretching comfortably forward.
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