ObjectiveTo systematically review the clinical value of the contrast-enhanced ultrasonic in the diagnosis of breast tumors. MethodsWe electronically and comprehensively searched the databases including The Cochrane Library (Issue 2, 2013), PubMed, CNKI, WanFang Data, Chaoxing medalink, VIP, and CBM for clinical research reports of diagnosing breast cancer with Contrast-enhance ultrasonic (all from foundation to May 2013). Two reviewers independently screened literature according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria, extracted data, and assessed the methodological quality of the included studies according to the QUADAS items. The Meta-DiSc software (version 1.4) was used to conduct pooling on sensitivity, specificity, positive likelihood ratio, and negative likelihood ratio. Heterogeneity test was performed and the summary receiver operating characteristic (SROC) curve was drawn for area under the curve (AUC). ResultsA total of 19 studies involving 1 161 participants were included. The results of meta-analysis showed that, specificity, the pooled sensitivity, positive likelihood ratio, negative likelihood ratio and DOR were 0.79 (95%CI 0.75 to 0.82), 0.86 (95%CI 0.83 to 0.89), 3.92 (95%CI 2.77 to 6.56), 0.18 (95%CI 0.13 to 0.26), and 25.86 (95%CI 13.77 to 48.55), respectively. The AUC of the SROC curve was 0.917 0. ConclusionThe current evidence shows that contrast-enhanced ultrasonic has high sensitivity and specificity in the diagnosis of preoperative benign and malignant breast mass, which indicates that it could be used as a good method to diagnosing breast tumors.
ObjectiveTo systematically review the clinical value of ultrasonographic elastography (UE) for the differential diagnosis of benign/malignant thyroid nodules. MethodsWe comprehensively searched the databases including The Cochrane Library (Issue2, 2013), PubMed, EMbase, CNKI, WanFang Data, Medalink, VIP and CBM from inception to the December of 2013, for including clinical research reports of determining thyroid nodules using ultrasonographic elastography. Literature screening according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria, data extraction and methodological quality assessment were completed by two reviewers independently. Then Meta-DiSc software (version 1.4) was used for pooling analysis. ResultsA total of 35 studies including 4 127 patients were included. The results of metaanalysis showed that, specificity, sensitivity, positive likelihood radio, negative likelihood radio and diagnostic odds ratio (DOR) were 0.89 (0.88 to 0.90), 0.88 (0.86 to 0.90), 6.37 (5.44 to7.47), 0.13 (0.11 to 0.16) and 58.72 (43.12 to 79.98), respectively; and the area under SROC curve (AUC) was 0.936 9. ConclusionCurrent evidence shows that ultrasonographic elastography has fairly high sensitivity (88%) and specificity (89%) in differential diagnosis of benign/malignant thyroid nodules. The positive rate in the malignant thyroid group is 58.72 times higher that in benign thyroid cancer with better efficacy in differential diagnosis, so ultrasonographic elastography is of effective and feasible diagnostic value for thyroid benign/malignant nodules.