Sonography versus palpation in the detection of regional lymph-node metastases in patients with malignant melanoma

Ultrasound examination of regional lymph nodes significantly improves early detection of locoregional metastases during the follow-up of patients with cutaneous melanoma

“…14 The percentage of false-negative results of palpation reported in the literature ranged between 6% and 39%. 4,7,15 In our study 28.6% of the histologically verified metastases were not palpable. However, falsepositive results were obtained by ultrasound examinations in only 6.1%.…”

“…Prayer et al reported that among 29 metastases detected by ultrasound in 217 melanoma patients, only 15 (52%) of the histologically verified metastases were palpable. 4 In another clinical study, clear differences between palpation and ultrasound were observed related to the size and the location of the metastases and additionally to the presence of scars due to former operations. 5 Makela et al demonstrated in patients with vulval malignancies that metastatic lymph nodes were detected by ultrasound in 82% of the cases, by palpation only in 9%.…”

Comparison of the efficacy of clinical examination, ultrasound neck and computed tomography in detection and staging of cervical lymph node metastasis in head and neck cancers

“…In previous studies there had been mixed results relating to ultrasound as a diagnostic tool. Prayer L. in 1990 (14) reported ultrasound to have sensitivity & specificity of 100% and 97% but at the same time Vanden Brekel in 1993 (30) reported them as 60% and 77% respectively. There are other studies also which gave low results for ultrasound (12) when used alone.…”

“…Studies have proposed the use of imaging techniques such as ultrasound (12,13,14,15) , Computed Tomography (16,17,18,19,20) , Magnetic resonance imaging (21,22,23,24) , and radionuclide scintigraphy (25,26,27,28,29) . These investigations have helped in improving the sensitivity and specificity for the detection of Lymph node involvement to a great extent.…”

Sonography for Locoregional Staging and Follow-up of Cutaneous Melanoma

“…Several reports [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11] have proven the better performance of sonography over physical examination in the detection of intransit and lymph node lesions. The combination with sonographically guided FNAC allows maximization of the overall accuracy.…”