DOES TRANS RECTAL ULTRASOUND (TRUS) HELPS IN DIFFERENTIAL DIAGNOSIS OF PROSTATE LESIONS? A STUDY AT TERTIARY CARE CENTER.

BACKGROUND: There are successions of investigations used in evaluation of prostatic pathology.Currently digital rectal examination & serum PSA levels are used for screening of prostatic cancer. Manyconventional imaging techniques like plain radiography, computed tomography, radionuclide scintigraphy andtransabdominal sonography were proved to be ineffective in detection of many prostatic conditions specially cancer at an earlystage. Transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) has traditionally been considered as the pivotal imaging test for the prostate,providing clinically important information regarding benign and malignant conditions. OBJECTIVES: to evaluate theTRUS and colour Doppler ndings in various benign and malignant prostatic lesions with respect to its site, echopattern, capsular status, local invasion, vascularity and to correlate with other investigations, like digital rectal examinationand serum PSA etc. and also to study the accuracy of TRUS in differentiating benign from malignant lesions.METHODOLOGY: A prospective observational study carried out over a period of 1.5 years at a tertiary care hospital. All malepatient referred to department of radio diagnosis with prostate related complains referred from surgery department. Studyincludes clinical symptoms, family and personal history, laboratory examination like PSA, radiological examination, digitalrectal examination. . Various statistical characteristics of the test such as sensitivity, specicity, positive predictive value,negative predictive value were calculated whenever applicable. Out of total 64 patients' recruited OBSERVATIONS:commonest age group was 61 – 70 years (39.1%). Commonest prostatic pathology encountered was BPH (56.2%) followed byprostatic carcinoma (31.3%), prostatitis (4.7%), prostatic abscess & calculus (3.1%) prostatic cyst (1.6%). 75% patients ofprostatic carcinoma and 13.9% of Benign Prostate Hypertrophy show PSA value greater than 10ng/ml. Echotexture patternfound on TRUS, in prostatic carcinoma patients was hypoechoic echotexture in 70% patients followed by mixed echotexture in20% patients. Examination in Color Doppler found, 80 % patients of prostatic carcinoma show increased vascularity and 25 %of benign lesion also shows increased vascularity including all three cases of prostatitis and one out of two case of prostaticabscess. Any single test alone is not helpful in arriving at a diagnosis, but all the thr CONCLUSION: ee tests i.e. PSA level,digital rectal examination, and transrectal ultrasound, together give very conrmatory result, specically to differentiatebenign from malignant condition of prostate. . Considering that the initial screening of patients will help in reducing thenumber of negative biopsies (unnecessary), without impairing the cancer detection capacity.