Emergency based ultrasound of clinically suspected acute appendicitis with low frequency curvilinear transducer and its association with surgical outcome

Aim: to determine the diagnostic accuracy of low frequency curvilinear transducer as an ancillary emergency tool for clinical suspects of acute appendicitis and its association with surgical outcome. material & methods: this cross sectional study was conducted at omer hospital between september 2008 and december 2010. we included 89 cases (38 male,51 female; age range 12-70 years,mean age 37 years) of clinically suspected acute appendicitis. clinical categorization was based on alvarado scoring. transabdominal ultrasound was performed using curvilinear low frequency 3.5-mhz transducer with graded compression technique,followed by linear high frequency transducer of 7.5mhz. all cases underwent appendectomy. specimen inflammatory grading was done by histopathology. results: out of 89 patients,71 cases presented with typical and 18 with atypical clinical symptoms and signs of acute appendicitis. on sonography,appendix was visualized in 73 cases (82%) using low frequency transducer in comparison to 78 cases (87.6%) by high frequency transducer. sensitivity and specificity of preoperative sonographic scan was about 68.0% and 88.0% respectively. association of sonographic and histopathological diagnostic evidences was also found statistically significant (p=0.000). conclusion: negative appendectomy rate can be substantially reduced by a careful ultrasound examination using low frequency transducer,which proves ancillary to clinical evaluation.