Usefulness of contrast‐enhanced ultrasonography with abdominal virtual ultrasonography in assessing therapeutic response in hepatocellular carcinoma treated with radiofrequency ablation

Abstract

CEUS with VUS is effective in assessing the therapeutic response to RFA of HCC. Moreover, the number of CECT scans required is reduced by this approach.

Contrast-enhanced ultrasonography used for post-treatment responses evaluation of radiofrequency ablations for hepatocellular carcinoma: a meta-analysis

“…The sensitivity of CEUS is .90% for detecting adequate ablation when compared with other approaches such as three-dimensional CT scans (97%) 17 and contrast-enhanced CT (91.6%). 22 The combined results from our study showed a 91% complete ablation rate, supporting the opinion that CEUS can be a substitute of CT scans in evaluation of the RFA effectiveness for HCCs.…”

“…24 A sufficient safe margin can greatly decrease the local tumour recurrence rate, whereas with the ablative margin width of ,5 mm, secondary RFA should be performed to ensure complete ablation. 22 Among the included studies, only two studies 15,22 have reported the complete ablated rate based on safe margin width. The results of our study indicated that the proportion of ablative margin width ,5 mm was 53%, which might be useful for the judgment of the following treatment effect for patients with HCC.…”

“…Two studies 15,22 in the present study explored the success rate of CEUS for safe margin. The proportion of adequate safety margin .5 mm detected by CEUS was 0.47 (95% CI: 0.30, 0.64) while that of ablative margin ,5 mm was 0.53 (95% CI: 0.36, 0.70) (Figure 3).…”

“…11 studies of which CEUS was not the only detection method, 11 meeting abstracts, 4 non-English studies and 3 without extractable data were excluded. Finally, a total of 12 studies [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]22,23 were enrolled in the meta-analysis. Table 1 shows the characteristics of the eligible studies.…”

Radiological diagnosis of hepatocellular carcinoma

“…After RFA, CEUS can asses therapeutic response, e.g. whether the tumour was ablated completely and whether sufficient safety margins were achieved (26). CEUS facilitates the application of percutaneous US-guided treatment by improving the localization of HCCs invisible to conventional ultrasound (27).…”