Liver scans

There are many scans that could be of assistance to examining a liver  such as:

Ultrasound

CT

MRI

2D Shearwave

Fibroscan

I will update and expand this information as I get time to do so, for the benefit of patients.

Ultrasound scans below are typical of the type of scans that liver specialists ahould obtain. Professor Darrell Crawford of Queensland Gastroenterology said to David Manteit that he could not read liver scans.

These are some actual patient scans below . Your Liver Specialist should be ordering these below , or most of them, every time you get an Upper Abdomen Scan which gives at least -

Views of Liver and size Normal ? Shrunken ? Enlarged ?

Views of Spleen ans size - Normal ? Enlarged ?

Views of Portal vein width and Velocity

Gallbladder width, Gallbladder max size calculi (stones) (Cholelithiasis and maybe worse - Cholelystis)

Bile duct width (scan) and comment re tender or not tender (report) 

Kidney images and length

Varices

Collaterals

Steatosis and grading

Echogenicity or not

Aorta width aand on report

Heterogenous or homogenous comment on report

Echogenicity

Caudate lobe ratio

Inflammtion / Fatty infiltration comment on report

Nodules - Micronodular ? (smaller) Macronodular ? (above 5mm)

Liver surface smooth or nodular ?

Shrunken Liver ? Enlarged Liver ?

Any cysts ? (see images above)

Thrombosis ?

Patent (normal) flow of Portal vein/s ? (on Doppler colour) (see images above).

Recanalisation of Paraumbilical vein ?

Any suspicious lesions worthy of an MRI?

There are many more items that I hope your Liver Specialist would order if your case has intricacies beyond the discussions on this website. Let's hope you get a good Liver Specialist. A Liver Specialist may tell you that he only orders what he see's fit. Rubbish. That's a porky pie. It's the same cost for all of the above or any of the above.

Case study - My Mater Liver Specialist never ordered Gallbladder stone size in an Ultrasound report, even though the report said Cholelithiasis (Gallstones ) every time.

Wouldn't you want to know what size they were ?

. The net result is that I got my gallstones down from 14.4 mm to 7.5 mm over 3 months, just by eating Weetbix  Cholesterol every morning . I got two comparison scans at QScan. QScan do gallbladder stones max size calculations as standard. Qld XRay do not, unless you ask them. Well, I asked !!!!!!!!!!!!!1 The Liver Specialist hadn't bothered to do this before. There is no other explanation other than laziness. The fact is I have Gallstones. So how big are they  ?????/ Helloooooo ????

The next time the Mater Specialist ordered an Ultrasound from Qld XRay , I took it upon myself to add in a few of the above including max Gallbladder stone size, and a few other things, directly from Qld XRay.

Qld XRay agreed to include this and many other items. I showed them the QScan report and I said "You better do what QScan report does, or else there will be trouble !!" 

If this is going over the Specialist's head, then bad luck to him. It's my life, not his. We only get one chance every six months unless you get another scan ordered from your GP, etc. Incidentally I do get 3 monthly interval scans. $250 less Medicare = around $100 net cost. Is your life worth $100 to see if you are getting better or worse, so you can take some action? 

You see, if my Gallstones go below 5mm , they will all travel to my urinary tract and be gone. Then I won't have Choloelithias.  I had to work out all that by myself. My Cholesterol also went down from 4.0 to 3.2 as promised on the side of the Weettbix packet (lol) . That does mean eating 40g of carbs (4 weetbix)  first thing in the morning, so just watch out for that.  This can cause your HbA1c and fasting sugar in your blood test to go up. That's another story . Bad liver can give your Diabetes 2 if you don't be careful.

 But lower Cholesterol also fixes up a lot of other liver and body problems. Did a Liver Specialist tell me about the above ? NO. I read my scans and Google and then hoped and prayed my cholesterol came down and it did. Turns out that some gallstones have something to do with high Cholesterol.