Incidental findings of gastrointestinal tumours at abdominal ultrasound examinations

A retrospective review was performed of 11 patients referred to ultrasound examination because of abdominal pain and/or a palpable abdominal tumour, which eventually was proven to be gastrointestinal malignancy. Primary gastric carcinoma was present in 4 cases, carcinoma of the small bowel in one case, and of the large bowel in 6 cases. All the patients were examined with conventional ultrasound technique using a 3.5 MHz and a 5.0 MHz transducer. In all the cases bowel wall thickness exceeded 10 mm. A correct organ localization and primary diagnosis of tumour was made in 6 cases, of which only 2 had a palpable abdominal mass. In the remaining cases a bowel tumour was revealed in 3 but the site was incorrectly defined. Reviewing the documentations made at ultrasonography in these cases the tumour origin corresponded well with radiologic and surgical findings. In 2 patients an abscess was diagnosed which later proved to be due to a large bowel carcinoma. Ultrasound examination of patients with uncharacteristic abdominal complaints can spare the patient unnecessary examinations when the findings are pointing at a tumour in the gastrointestinal tract, save time and therefore is of economical importance

Computed tomography of the thymus Gland in myasthenia gravis

Sixteen consecutive patients with myasthenia gravis were examined by computed tomography (CT) before thymectomy. Surgical and histologic findings were compared with those obtained at CT. The results, like those of most other recent studies, indicate that CT is a reliable method for identifying thymoma. In all three patients with thymoma, and in five out of eight patients with hyperplasia, the lesion was observed at CT, giving an overall accuracy of 80 per cent. Although tymic hyperplasia is a basically histologic diagnosis an enlarged gland may give a correct diagnosis of this abnormality

Vectorcardiogram more sensitive than 12‐lead ECG in the detection of inferior myocardial infarction

Summary. The vectorcardiogram (VCG) is commonly stated to be more sensitive than the 12‐lead electrocardiogram (ECG) for the diagnosis of inferior myocardial infarction. However, a recent study indicated that VCG is not superior to ECG for this diagnosis. The purpose of this study was to compare the performance of VCG and ECG criteria and to indicate possible explanations for the disagreement between earlier studies. Accordingly, we studied 65 patients with inferior myocardial infarction verified by left ventriculography or 201‐TI myocardial scintigraphy and 351 normal subjects. Sensitivity was 69% (45/65) and 43% (28/65) for the VCG and ECG criteria, respectively. This difference was highly significant (P<0·001). Among the normal subjects there were only three with false positive VCG and none with false positive ECG. We conclude that both VCG and ECG criteria for the diagnosis of inferior myocardial infarction are highly specific and that VCG criteria have greater sensitivity than ECG criteria

Why the econometrician is in good spirits: a workshop through the looking glass

Health, Econometrics, 1066, Hitchhiker’s guide, C01, I12, Z19,

Phantom study of chest radiography with storage phosphor, selenium, and film-screen systems

Purpose: Chest radiographs from 3 digital systems - 2 based on luminescent phosphors and one on selenium - and a conventional film-screen system were evaluated and compared. Material and Methods: Computed radiography (CR) has for the past years been dominated by a single manufacturer, but now several systems have been marketed. Using a chest phantom and, as test objects, 2 simulated tumours for the lung and mediastinum, respectively, and one object simulating pulmonary lines, a total of 400 exposures were made, 100 on each system. The test objects were placed randomly with a ratio of presence/absence of each object of about 50. Six radiologists participated, 2 residents and 4 staff members. A receiver operating characteristics (ROC) analysis was performed with construction of curves, and the difference between the curves was estimated with a 2-tailed paired t-test. Results and Conclusion: The selenium-based system performed significantly better for pulmonary line detection than all the other systems, and better than one storage phosphor system for the lung "tumour" (p<0.05), while one storage phosphor system was slightly better than the other in diagnosing all 3 test objects. The score for the film-screen system was only average