Ricerc@Sapienza

Background
Most renal tumors are diagnosed by diagnostic investigation performed for other medical reason. Traditionally, US, CT and MRI are gold standard for detecting and characterising renal masses. Most renal masses are diagnosed accurately by imaging alone. CT or MRI imaging must be performed before and after administration of intravenous contrast material to demonstrate lesion enhancement. In some cases, contrast-enhanced US can be helpful. In this context, the recently introduced contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) may provide the opportunity to asses small renal masses (pT1) as well as choose therapeutic plan and follow-up.

Purpose
Objective of this study is to assess the feasibility and diagnostic efficacy of CEUS technique as compared with traditional CT or MRI in detecting and characterizing small renal masses.

Methods and Materials
Consecutive patients with previous detected small renal mass lesion at ultrasound, CT or MRI will be prospectively CEUS by an expert radiologist blinded to CT/MRI result. The imaging result will be compared with CT/MRI and surgical and pathological result in order to asses the sensitivity and specificity in tumor detection and characterization. The diagnostic accuracy (sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value) of CEUS will be estimated and compared using ROC curve analysis.