Low-dose over contrast-enhanced abdominal CT: for acute appendicitis, in young adults

The diagnostic performance of low-dose CT is comparable to standard dose CT, to characterize/analyze appendicitis in young adults.




Acute appendicitis_CT scan
The medical research study was conducted by So Yeon Kim, MD; Kyoung Ho Lee, MD, PhD; Kyuseok Kim, MD, PhD; Tae Yun Kim, MD, PhD; Hye Seung Lee, MD, PhD; Seung-sik Hwang, MD, PhD; Ki Jun Song, PhD; Heung Sik Kang, MD, PhD; Young Hoon Kim, MD, PhD and Joong Eui Rhee, MD, PhD from the Departments of Radiology, Emergency Medicine, Seoul National University, Korea; Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, Inha University School of Medicine, Incheon, Korea; and Department of Biostatistics, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea.

Appendicitis is an inflammation/rubor of the vermiform/cecal appendix. The research objective was to equate standard and low radiation doses in intravenous, contrast-enhanced abdominal CT scan, for identification of acute appendicitis in young adults.

The study comprised about 257 patients, suspected of appendicitis that passed through CT with standard/low radiation dose; through with Wilcoxon rank-sum test, Freeman-Halton statistics, and ROC curve analysis the diagnostic performance of CT was recorded and equated by, for appendicitis.

Of 44 standard dose and 55 low radiation dose examinations, one of the abdominal radiologists made primary report, which served as final report; for residual examination, on-call radiologists were requested that submitted over primary reports, and the abdominal radiologists then put forward final reports.

About primary reports – standard and low dose CT groups did not considerably vary in regions under the receiver operating characteristic curve, specificity or sensitivity, for detection of appendicitis; no considerable deviation could be established amongst two groups in confidence level, when diagnosing/debarring appendicitis in preliminary reports; identical results were marked for the final reports. The dose groups even did not substantially vary in terms of subsequent: appendiceal visualization/image, distinctive characterization of appendiceal perforation, sensitivity for substitution method/diagnoses etc.

Conclusion: the diagnostic performance of low dose computed tomography to that of standard-dose CT is comparable, for characterization of appendicitis in young adults.