A comparison of computed tomography,retroperitoneal air insufflation and B-mode ultrasounic exa mination in localizing

Twenty-eight patients suspected of adrenal disease underwent examinations with computed tomography（CT）,retroperitoneal air insufflation（RPAI）and/or B-mode ultrasound（BU）.A comparison of these data with the final clinical and pathological diagnoses were presented.Altogether, 75 examinations were done in these 28 patients.The results showed that the diagnostic accuracy of CT seemed to be the best（87.5%）.This was especially true among those with unilateral lesion.No false negative case was found with this variety of exam.RPA was found to be good in specificity（75%）in the detection of adrenal diseases,whereas BU to be least valuable,as it was low in sensitivity and yielded a false negative rate as high as 50%.The authors concluded that CT is definitely the method of choice for diagnosing unilateral adrenal lesions whenever the clinical and biochemical studies suggest such a condition.When the adrenal lesions are suspected as being bilateral RPA may be more usueful for showing the outlines of both adrenal glands and choosed as the first-line examination.Because the diagnostic value of BU for adrenal lesion was seen to be very poor,it seems to be justifiable to discard it as a tool for the investigation of adrenal lesions.