The potential of endoscopic ultrasound sonography (EUS)-elastography in determining the stage of pancreatic tumor

The current study was designed to evaluate the role of semi-quantitative EUS- elastography (strain ratio) in staging malignant pancreatic lesions.

Pancreatic cancer is considered one of the most lethal malignancies with a survival rate of only 5% worldwide. Pancreatic lesions include a wide range of diagnoses from benign to malignant forms. Biopsy and pathological study are the gold standard for the differentiation of malignant lesions and staging of tumors. Recently, endoscopic ultrasound sonography (EUS) elastography has been noticed as a non-invasive diagnosis modality. Nevertheless, no evidence of its potential to determine different stages of malignant tumors is available.

This prospective study included 81 adult patients with a confirmed diagnosis of malignant pancreatic lesion in different clarified stages. All diagnoses were confirmed after endoscopic ultrasound sonography via pathological investigation of surgical specimens or needle biopsies. The results of EUS-elastography based on tumor size (T staging), involved lymph nodes (N staging), and metastasis (M staging) were compared with the gold standard.

The mean age of patients was 60.11±13.57 years. The mean SR elastography value was 52.78±48.97. Elastography could not significantly discriminate T stage, N stage, or M stage of tumors (p=0.57, p=0.92, p=0.11, respectively). Moreover, the Spearman rank correlation coefficients for the correlation between T staging, N staging, M staging and SR elastography were not significant (p=0.40, p=0.94, p=0.39, respectively).

The non-invasive modality EUS-elastography cannot replace the gold standard in staging tumors; however, EUSelastography seemed to differentiate benign lesions from malignant ones.