Usefulness of contrast echocardiography in diagnosing space-occupying lesions of the heart

Objective To assess the usefulness of contrast echocardiography in differential diagnosing space-occupying lesions of the heart.Methods Contrast echocardiography was assessed for 38 patients of space-occupying lesion of the heart (SOLH).Contrast enhancement of SOLH was assessed visually,comparing with that in the adjacent myocardium:significant contrast enhancement,intensity higher than or equal to the adjacent myocardium; mild or partial contrast enhancement,intensity lower than the adjacent myocardium,or no contrast enhancement.Respectively,malignant tumors,benign tumors,and thrombus were diagnosed.Twenty-eight patients among the 38 cases had gold standard diagnosis.The consistency between visual assessment diagnosis and gold standards were compared with Kappa statistic.Results Visual semi-quantitative diagnosis of contrast echocardiography:thrombus,benign tumors and malignant tumors were diagnosed for 8,8 and 12 cases,separately.Except two highly vascular benign tumors (1rhabdomyoma and 1 paraganglioma) were misdiagnosed as malignant tumors,the rest 26 cases matched gold standard diagnosis.Quantitative analysis of contrast echocardiography,16 cases were suitable for quantitative an alysis,10 cases were diagnosed as benign tumors or thrombus (quantitative analysis could not differentiate the two),the rest 6 cases were diagnosed as malignant tumors.Quantitative analysis got the same 2 misdiagnosis as visual semi-quantitative diagnosis.Kappa value on visual semi-quantitative diagnosis of contrast echocardiography comparing with gold standard diagnosis was 0.892.Conclusions The characteristics of vascularity of SOLH can be accurately determined by the contrast enhancement level in diseased region through visual semi-quantitative analysis with contrast echocardiography.Contrast echocardiography can be mainly used in SOLH except thrombus that has been clearly diagnosed,especially for patients with on going or fore-past malignancy in other organs. Key words: Echocardiography;  Microbubbles;  Heart neoplasms