Ultrasonography in the Diagnosis of Amoebic Liver Abscess and its Complications

INTRODUCTION The great majority of amoebic liver abscesses (ALA) can be reliably diagnosed on clinical grounds alone with the aid of a few simple investigations (Lamont criteria I). However, due to atypical presentation and complications ALA has continued to pose diagnostic problems even in the developed world-, Moreover, amoeba serological tests are not of much diagnostic help in endemic regions because of a high rate of false positivity'. Ultrasound is a non-invasive, non-teratogenic, non-harmful, fast and comparably cheap method of diagnostic imaging, yielding immediate results. Since being introduced into clinical practice in 1966, ultrasound has gained wide acceptance as the primary mode of diagnostic imaging in diseases of many organs. Focal lesions of the liver as small as 0.5-1 crrr' are particularly accessible to sonographic evaluation with a high degree of precision. With regard to ALA both diagnostic sensitivity and specificity of ultrasound have been calculated as high as 90010 5•6• Because of its dependency on the examiner's experience, ultrasound is still inferior to computed tomography':", but it is also much less expensive.