Transcutaneous ultrasound in detecting of the gastric tumors

The Aim of the study was to evaluate the usefulness of measuring of the gastric wall thickness in detecting of the gastric tumors, using ultrasound as a screening method.

Materials and methods: 2400 patients consecutively presented for abdominal complains were included in a protocol investigation focused on the detecting of gastric wall thickness abnormalities. A dedicated soft, (Ecostat1), was created to help in data processing. All the patients with measured values larger than 10mm were referred to endoscopy.

Results: the computed program gave us the possibility to obtain all the patients depending on the gastric wall thickness value. In 31 patients with the thickness over 10mm we detected gastric cancer in nine of them (29%, or 0.37% from the general group), and benign tumors in eight patients (25,8%). The difference of 14 patients (45,1%) consists in false positive cases. As an other example, in 23 patients group with the wall thickness up to 15mm there were no one false positive, all the patients presenting gastric tumors.

Conclusions: Transcutaneous ultrasound is able to measure the oesophagian, gastric and duodenal wall thickness. Even if almost half patients with values over 10mm are false positives, this limit are operating in selecting cases for upper endoscopy. Beside the well known advantages of the transcutaneous ultrasound, it could be considered a useful method in gastric cancer screening.