Benefits of dynamic contrast ultrasonography for differential diagnosis focal liver lesions

5 3. Summary Purpose: To evaluate the clinical utility of contrast enhanced ultrasonography (CEUS) for the characterisation of focal liver lesions with the emphasis on the benign entities. Our aim was to find out the accuracy of CEUS to differentiate between the malignant and benign lesions and to extend the knowledge about the typical signs of solid benignomas on CEUS. Material and methods: our material consists of 163 liver masses observed in 144 patients. The final dianosis has been stated by means of the computed tomography in 26.4 %, magnetic resonance imaging (60.4 %) and histology (25.8 %). There was a majority of women (n=90) against men (n=54); the average age was 47.6 years. The number of benign lesions (n=137) markedly exceeded the number of malignant ones (n=6). The dominant lesions were hemangiomas (n=66), the second most common was focal nodular hyperplasia (FNH, n=42). The other lesions comprised of limited numbers of entities(focal steatotic or nonsteatis regions: n=21, metastatic lesions: n=15, hepatocelullar carcinoma, n=7, regenerative nodular hyperplasia, n=5, peripheral cholangiogenic carcinoma, n=4, and others - inflemmatory pseudotumour, adenoma, epithelial angiomyolipoma). Results: The accuracy of CEUS for the differentiation of malign or benign lesion was 95, 7 %. Regarding the...