How well does sonoelastography assess myopathy?

This Tuesday morning refresher course will discuss how sonoelastography could help clinicians not only assess inflammatory myopathies, but also track their treatment.

A team led by Dr. Yoonah Song of Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, South Korea, studied 16 patients with 17 inflammatory myopathies to assess the performance of real-time sonoelastography. The researchers then correlated these findings with active inflammation found on MR. All lesions underwent ultrasound-guided biopsy.

Sixteen of the 17 inflammations were confirmed by sonoelastography, Song and colleagues found; increased muscle hardness, or strain ratio, was associated with cases of inflammatory myopathies. In fact, the correlation between the elastography images' strain ratio and pathologic data suggests that sonoelastography could be useful both for diagnosing myopathies and managing their treatment.