Vol. 42 (1): 172-173, January – February, 2016
doi: 10.1590/S1677-5538.IBJU.2015.0668
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
RE: Ultrasonic Measurement of Testicular Tumors and the Correlation with Pathologic Specimen Sizes
Ibrahim Karademir 1, Zafer Demirer 2, Suela Karademir 3, Yalcın Bozkurt 4, Ali Guragac 5
1 Department of Radiology, Eskisehir Military Hospital, Eskisehir, Turkey; 2 Department of Urology, Eskisehir Military Hospital, Eskisehir, Turkey; 3 Department of Radiology, Yunus Emre Hospital, Eskisehir, Turkey; 4 Department of Radiology, Golcuk Military Hospital, Kocaeli, Turkey; 5 Department of Urology, Tatvan Military Hospital, Bitlis, Turkey
To the editor,
We read with great interest the article “The value of testicular ultrasound in the prediction of the type and size of testicular tumors” by Shtricker et al. (1). They aimed to assess the correlation between ultrasound (US) findings and testicular tumor type and size. The authors concluded that the testis US findings underestimated the size in 25% of the malignant testicular lesions and 16% of the cases were proven to be benign. Thus they recommended putting into practice frozen sections for borderline cases. This study gives substantial information on this clinically relevant condition. The awareness of this diagnostic finding and its clinical results may increase the accuracy of preoperative management of the patients with testicular lesions. Thanks to the authors for this contribution.
Several medical subspecialties manage their treatments with respect to anatomic measurements. The reproducibility and accuracy of the measurements are especially crucial in radiology as important clinical decisions are often based on the assumption that radiologic measurements are accurate and any measurement differences on follow-up imagings represent a real change in size. Favorably, measurements of the tumors on images should be accurate, reproducible, and practiced in a standardized method with low rates of intra-and interobserver variability. Even so, there a lot of factors, which may affect the consistency of the measurement, including patient-dependent factors, technical factors and radiologist-dependent factors (2,3).
