Usefulness and limitations of sinus echography in the child

The authors report their preliminary experience in B-mode maxillary sinus echography. The experience takes into account a series of 52 sinuses of children under 10. The study revealed that maxillary sinus echography is a rapid, harmless and quite specific method (i.e. a method which reports few false positives when the existence of possible artifactual echoes is not disregarded), sensitive for secretions, less sensitive for polyps and mucosal thickenings, mainly posterior ones. The method is hampered by the presence of the anterior bone wall, which creates artifacts and thus false positives; yet, it is probably in the child where this handicap is the smallest since normally, in the child, the bone wall is the thinnest. Echography appears to be a really complementary method for radiology, but--according to this preliminary experience, at least--it cannot still pretend to act as a substitute for it. The reproducibility of the method and its reliability, among others in relation to sinusoscopy, are still to be investigated with more accuracy.