Ultrasound compression elastography: possibilities for early diagnosing in case of dystrophic lesions of the long dorsal sacroiliac ligament with low back pain

Abstract

Objective. Evaluate the possibility of using ultrasound compression elastography for detecting early dystrophic changes in the long dorsal sacroiliac ligaments in case of pain in the lower backMaterials. To achieve this goal, we compared the data of compression elastography of the long dorsal sacroiliac ligament in 36 patients aged 46.0 years [23; 54] with lower back pain (experimental group) and 30 patients aged 36.5 years [29; 48] without lower back pain (control group).Results. The results of the evaluation of diagnostic significance of ultrasound compression elastography were as follows: AUC ‒ 0.81 (95% CI (0.63; 0.93)), p=0.0001; Juden index ‒ 0.64, sensitivity ‒ 90% (95% CI (0.69; 0.99)), p=0.0001; specificity ‒ 74% (95% CI (0.56; 0.99)), p=0.0001.Conclusion. Compression elastography enables to detect areas of long dorsal sacroiliac ligament structure disorganization in cases where standard B-mode can’t reveal changes in the structure of this ligament. For the long dorsal sacroiliac ligament, ultrasound compression elastography has comparable sensitivity (90%) to shear wave elastography, but lower specificity (74%) and prognostic value (81%), allowing a fairly confident diagnosis of early degenerative changes in the long dorsal sacroiliac ligament.