Clinical specialty
Prof. Lene Terslev is a Consultant in Rheumatology and Head of Ultrasound Division at Glostrup Hospital in Denmark. Here, she presents a live ultrasound demo of quantitative scoring of synovitis.
Prof. Lene states when we use ultrasound for examining synovitis what we are looking for is the swelling of the synovial lining and it is also the hyperemic part of the synovitis process which we use Doppler to visualise.
There are different ways of grading the severity of the inflammatory activity. Normally a grading from zero to three is used, where zero is no inflammatory activity and three is severe inflammatory activity. However, there are other ways of quantifying the inflammation in the joint and ones of those ways is to use a Q-analysis. Q-analysis is a program that calculates the number of coloured pixels inside the joint in relation to the total amount of synovial hypertrophy and in this way gives us a percentage of how many pixels inside the joint are covered by coloured pixels.
Prof. Lene then goes on to demonstrate how to apply Q-analysis to assess the degree of inflammatory activity inside a joint. This type of analysis can be used in both joint inflammation and when assessing inflammatory activity in tendons.
