Portal gas is relatively rare, and its relationship to ischemic bowel diseases has been emphasized. We report the case of a 70-year-old woman with acute obstructive cholangitis in whom portal gas was detected by ultrasonography (US) but not by computed tomography (CT). The former showed multiple echo spots moving in the portal vein. Doppler signals confirmed them to be bidirectional and spiky, which immediately led to the diagnosis of portal gas. Immediate appropriate antibiotic treatment and biliary drainage yielded the disappearance of the portal gas. We stress the usefulness of US and Doppler US for detecting and diagnosing portal gas. Our observation suggests that when portal gas is detected by US, the possibility of cholangitis should be included in the differential diagnosis.

CEUS allows us to differentiate active bleeding (presence of contrast medium in the ascites) from nonactive bleeding.

No abstract

There is a marked paucity of contrast-enhanced ultrasound (US) findings of gallbladder disease in the literature, and there is only one previous case of gallbladder adenoma. We report such a case. US showed a 2-cm polypoid lesion at the gallbladder body. Color Doppler US showed the hypervascular nature of the lesion, and contrast-enhanced US revealed the lesion to be homogeneously enhanced, suggesting that the lesion was composed of the same pathology. The lesion was surgically resected, and was found to be an adenoma without cancer foci. This case suggests that contrast-enhanced US is an effective tool in diagnosing a gallbladder adenoma.

Intracystic slow bleeding is very difficult to diagnose using conventional sonography; consequently, a new sonographic technique has been sought. We present a histologically proven hepatobiliary cystadenoma with intracystic bleeding in which contrast-enhanced sonography (CEUS) showed microbubbles oozing from the cyst wall into the cystic cavity 10 minutes after intravenous injection of contrast medium. CEUS is an important diagnostic tool for diagnosing liver tumors, but the CEUS finding of slow intracystic bleeding has not been reported. Our observation suggests that this technique may be a new diagnostic tool for this purpose.