Copyright
©The Author(s) 2021. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Oct 28, 2021; 27(40): 6939-6950
Published online Oct 28, 2021. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v27.i40.6939
Published online Oct 28, 2021. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v27.i40.6939
Long-term follow-up of liver alveolar echinococcosis using echinococcosis multilocularis ultrasound classification
Jasmin Schuhbaur, Melissa Schweizer, Jana Philipp, Julian Schmidberger, Patrycja Schlingeloff, Wolfgang Kratzer, Department of Internal Medicine I, University Hospital Ulm, Ulm 89081, Germany
Author contributions: Kratzer W and Schuhbaur J planned and designed the study; The data were evaluated by Kratzer W and Schuhbaur J; all authors were involved in the interpretation of the results; Kratzer W, Schuhbaur J, Schmidberger J, Schlingeloff P, Schweizer M and Philipp J prepared the first draft; the statistical analysis was performed by Schmidberger J and Schlingeloff P; all authors read, amended, and approved the final version of the manuscript.
Institutional review board statement: The study was approved by the local ethics committee and conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (ref. No. 166/13). Because of its retrospective design and pseudonymised evaluation of imaging, no ethics approval was necessary. All data were analysed anonymously.
Informed consent statement: Because of retrospective and anonymous character of this study, the need for informed consent was waived by the institutional review board.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Data sharing statement: The datasets used and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request wolfgang.kratzer@uniklinik-ulm.de ).
STROBE statement: The authors have read the STROBE Statement-checklist of items, and the manuscript was prepared and revised according to the STROBE Statement-checklist of items.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Wolfgang Kratzer, MD, Professor, Department of Internal Medicine I, University Hospital Ulm, Albert-Einstein-Allee 23, Ulm 89081, Germany. wolfgang.kratzer@uniklinik-ulm.de
Received: July 20, 2021
Peer-review started: July 20, 2021
First decision: August 19, 2021
Revised: September 1, 2021
Accepted: September 22, 2021
Article in press: September 22, 2021
Published online: October 28, 2021
Peer-review started: July 20, 2021
First decision: August 19, 2021
Revised: September 1, 2021
Accepted: September 22, 2021
Article in press: September 22, 2021
Published online: October 28, 2021
Core Tip
Core Tip: Alveolar echinococcosis is potentially fatal. In approximately 98% of cases, it manifests in the liver, similar to a primary malignant or metastatic tumour. The sonomorphological appearance of the disease is varied and easily confused with other differential diagnoses. Sonography is the most important tool in diagnostics, but how the known patterns change over time is unclear. The evidence that certain sonographic patterns in particular change over time shows a possible evolutionary approach to the disease and may, in the long term, make lifelong drug therapy unnecessary in non-operable patients when non-active stages can be clearly identified.