Abstract
Welcome to this special issue on non-hepatic applications of contrast-enhanced ultrasound. The benefits of CEUS imaging in organs such as the heart and liver, for which it was originally licensed, are now well established, but new applications continue to be explored. This special issue brings together a collection of articles showing that CEUS can be a very useful additional imaging tool for assessing vascularity in the kidneys, spleen and testes as well as in the detection of endoleaks in post EVAR follow-up and DVT. Professor Paul Sidhu introduces this special issue overleaf in a guest editorial, charting the development of CEUS and highlighting new areas where it is being shown to be most useful. CEUS may become a practical alternative to contrast CT in many circumstances, avoiding the use of nephrotoxic contrast agents and exposure to radiation.
You will have noticed by the time you reach this point, that Ultrasound has had something of a makeover. In collaboration with our publisher, SAGE Publications, we have redesigned the internal layout and cover to be more consistent with the recently rebranded BMUS website. The new internal format is also more consistent with industry standards for journals and helps to make content more discoverable through search engines. I do hope that you like the new look front cover. This will now be the same for each issue and will not show short titles for the content. We will also bid a fond farewell to the hand of a previous editor that has been a feature of the front cover for the last six years!
As editor, I would like to think that the quality and content of Ultrasound has continued to improve. So I am delighted to be able to tell you that Ultrasound has been selected for inclusion in a new area of Web of Science called the Emerging Sources Citation Index. According to owners Thompson Reuters, this new index will extend Web of Science to include high-quality, peer-reviewed publications of regional importance and in emerging fields. The content will be visible in Web of Science, where it is searchable, discoverable and citable. I hope this development will give a new incentive to authors to send their work to Ultrasound for publication.
For those of you who attended the excellent BMUS Annual Scientific Meeting in Cardiff in December, it probably now feels like a distant memory. However, I would like to encourage those who presented their work there as a lecture or poster to consider writing it up as an article for Ultrasound. Publishing your work in the journal ensures that a much wider audience can learn from your efforts, you will have a permanent record and your work will now be discoverable in Web of Science. If you need a little extra incentive, two of the articles that won journal prizes in 2015 started out as ASM presentations.
For 2015, there were two joint winners and one runner up for the postgraduate paper prize. The winners were: Dr Neeraj Purohit for his article entitled “Ultrasound of lower limb sports injuries”; and Katie Johnson for her article “Temporomandibular joint effusion and its relationship with perceived disability assessed using musculoskeletal ultrasound and a patient-reported disability index”. The runner-up was Dr Anu Obaro for his article entitled “Benign liver lesions: grey-scale and contrast-enhanced ultrasound appearances”. In addition, the inaugural Paul Allan prize for the best paper published in Ultrasound in 2015 was awarded to Dr Iain Willits for his article entitled “What proportions of focal liver lesions detected by unenhanced ultrasound are inconclusive?”
I do hope that you find this special issue a useful educational resource and I look forward to seeing some article submissions from you! You can find author instructions and all you need to know on the journal website at: http://ult.sagepub.com.