Objective: To evaluate the consistency of dopamine transporter (DAT) positron emission tomography (PET) versus transcranial sonography (TCS) of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients.
Methods: A total of 53 clinically diagnosed idopathic PD patients from Beijing Tiantan Hospital underwent (11)C-CFT PET and transcranial sonography (TCS). Asymmetric reduced dopaminergic function was a positive result of PET while unilateral hyperechoic area larger than 0.2 cm2 a positive result of TCS. Kappa test was used to evaluate the consistency of two methods.
Results: Among them, 36 patients (67.92%) were TCS positive while 17 patients (32.08%) TCS negative. There were 48 patients (90.57%) with positive PET whereas PET was negative for 5 patients (9.43%). TCS and PET were both positive in 33 patients (62.26%) while 2 (3.77%) yielded a double negative result. As compared with the PET results, the sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value of TCS were 68.75%, 40%, 91.67% and 11.76% respectively. For Kappa test, Kappa = 0.042, P = 0.690, P > 0.05. It inferred a poor consistency.
Conclusions: TCS has a high predictive value for PET positive PD patients. For clinically diagnosed PD patients, a positive TCS result highly predicts PD without DAT-PET. However a negative TCS result can not rule out the possibility of PD. DAT-PET needs to be performed for further confirmation.