Ultrasound, computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging - which is preferred for acute appendicitis in children? A Meta-analysis.
BACKGROUND
There is no established consensus about the relative accuracies of US, CT and MRI in childhood appendicitis.


OBJECTIVE
To compare, through meta-analysis, the accuracies of US, CT and MRI for clinically suspected acute appendicitis in children.


METHODS
PubMed, Embase, Web of Science and the Cochrane Library were searched. After study selection, data extraction and quality assessment, the sensitivity, specificity and the area under the curve of summary receiver operating characteristic were calculated and compared.


RESULTS
Twenty-seven articles including 29 studies met the inclusion criteria, including 19 studies (9,170 patients) of US, 6 studies (928 patients) of CT and 4 studies (990 patients) of MRI. The analysis showed that the area under the receiver operator characteristics curve of MRI (0.995) was a little higher than that of US (0.987) and CT (0.982; P > 0.05).


CONCLUSIONS
US, CT and MRI have high diagnostic accuracies of clinically suspected acute appendicitis in children overall with no significant difference.
Department of Radiology, ZhongNan Hospital of Wuhan University, 169 Donghu Rd, Wuchang, 430071, Wuhan, China.
Hanfei
H
Zhang
Department of Radiology, ZhongNan Hospital of Wuhan University, 169 Donghu Rd, Wuchang, 430071, Wuhan, China. liaomy@whu.edu.cn.
Meiyan
M
Liao
Department of Radiology, ZhongNan Hospital of Wuhan University, 169 Donghu Rd, Wuchang, 430071, Wuhan, China.
Jie
J
Chen
Department of Radiology, ZhongNan Hospital of Wuhan University, 169 Donghu Rd, Wuchang, 430071, Wuhan, China.
Dongyong
D
Zhu
Department of Radiology, ZhongNan Hospital of Wuhan University, 169 Donghu Rd, Wuchang, 430071, Wuhan, China.
Sama
S
Byanju
D001064:Appendicitis / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D002648:Child; D003937:Diagnosis, Differential; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D014057:Tomography, X-Ray Computed; D014463:Ultrasonography
Acute appendicitis; Children; Computed tomography; Diagnostic accuracy; Magnetic resonance imaging; Meta-analysis; Ultrasonography