Abdominal tomography without oral contrast: evaluation of its performance in acute non-traumatic abdominal pain

Abstract

Objective: Evaluate th0e diagnostic performance of abdominal tomography without oral contrast medium in patients with abdominal pain. Materials and methods: Abdominal tomographies of patients with abdominal pain were included, between September 1 and December 31, 2015 at the Hospital Universitario San Vicente Fundación. For the analysis of the tomographies with or without oral contrast, the definitive diagnostic result in the surgical intervention or by clinical diagnosis was considered as a reference test. We calculated the sensitivity, specificity and positive and negative predictive values with their respective 95% confidence intervals for tomography with and without oral contrast. Results: 128 abdominal tomographies, 91 with oral contrast and 37 without this type of contrast were evaluated. The tomography without oral contrast had a sensitivity and specificity very similar to the tomography with contrast, with values of 84% and 91.6%, respectively. Conclusion: The performance of the tomography with oral contrast was similar to the tomography without oral contrast, with values close to 90%. The acquisition of tomography with oral contrast took almost 3 times longer than that required in the studies without oral contrast.

Keywords

• abdomen acute
• abdominal pain
• contrast media
• tomography x-ray computed