Real-time elastography in the diagnosis of patients suspected of having prostate cancer: a meta-analysis.

The goal of the study described here was to assess the performance of real-time elastography (RTE) in the detection of prostate cancers using a meta-analysis. A literature search of PubMed, Medline, Embase and the Cochrane Library was conducted. Published studies that evaluated the diagnostic performance of RTE in the diagnosis of prostate cancer and using the histopathology of the radical prostatectomy specimen as a reference standard were included. Sensitivity, specificity, positive likelihood ratio, negative likelihood ratio and area under the curve were calculated to examine the accuracy of RTE. A total of seven studies that included 508 patients were analyzed. The pooled sensitivity and specificity for the diagnosis of prostate cancer by RTE were 0.72 (95% confidence interval: 0.70-0.74) and 0.76 (0.74-0.78), respectively. The summary diagnostic odds ratio was 12.59 (7.26-21.84), and the area under the curve was 0.841 (Q* = 0.773). In conclusion, RTE imaging has high accuracy in the detection of prostate cancers using the histopathology of the radical prostatectomy specimen as the reference standard and may reduce the number of core biopsies in the future.