Editorial

Amidst an unusually pleasant, warm British summer, we bring to you some more enlightening reading material in this August issue. In this issue of Ultrasound, we have two review articles, one of which is an invited review from Professor Paul Sidhu’s team in King’s College, London. Besides, we present to you three papers under the section of original research and two interesting case reports.

Rafailidis and Sidhu inform us about newer techniques and the latest advances in the field of vascular ultrasound and illustrate how the adoption of multiparametric ultrasound into everyday clinical practice could address the patient’s needs. Timmis et al. describe the usefulness of ultrasound scanning in real-time evaluation of tissue characteristics while obtaining tissue samples from extra-orbital lesions. Their technique was well tolerated and uncomplicated.

Ross et al. present the results of a 10-year review of the role and accuracy of ultrasound scan in identifying molar pregnancy. They correlate ultrasound findings with histological confirmation. Although there has been improvement in the identification of molar pregnancies with ultrasound, they mention about the challenges in ultrasound diagnosis, particularly in cases of partial mole. Dighe and colleagues’ work on B-flow imaging is interesting. It is a technique of displaying flow information without using Doppler technology. It directly displays the flowing intravascular echoes during real-time grey-scale ultrasound. They report their findings of B-flow imaging of placental blood flow and reveal that artefacts could potentially interfere with interpretation of B-flow images, and therefore one needs to exercise care in identifying such artefacts.

Scott and colleagues’ very useful study aimed to evaluate the risk of infection associated with semi invasive ultrasound procedures including endocavity ultrasound scanning using microbiological reports and antibiotic prescriptions as proxy measures. Their work once again highlights the importance of anti-infective measures in ultrasound procedures including use of protective sheaths, cleaning and decontamination of ultrasound probes.

The usefulness of contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) is reported by Piorkowska and colleagues in a case report. They report the application and utilisation of this technique in appropriate identification of a hepatic haemangioma in a patient of an age group where use of other imaging techniques may not be easy.

Yusuf et al. present another interesting case report to highlight the usefulness of CEUS. The authors report percutaneous drainage of parotid gland abscess with the use of CEUS. This method of treating such an abscess can potentially avoid complications of more invasive surgical drainage.

The editorial office continues to look forward to receiving more works of original research which may include cohort studies, review of case series, in vitro experiments or properly carried out audit. Before the end of this year, we hope to meet you here again in November. Until then, we must make the most of the remaining summer and look forward to indulging in nature’s colourful display during the ensuing autumn.