Clinical study of scrotum scintigraphy in 49 patients with acute scrotal pain: a comparison with ultrasonography.

The significance of scrotum scintigraphy in differentiating acute testicular torsion from acute orchiepididymitis was evaluated. In this report, 49 patients with acute scrotal pain were examined with radionuclide scrotum scintigraphy and ultrasonography in parallel for comparison. Of 37 patients with decreased radioactivity in the abnormal side scrotum, 35 were diagnosed with testicular torsion surgically and the other 2 were diagnosed with indirect inguinal hernia. Only 17 among the 35 patients were diagnosed by ultrasonography as having testicular torsion. The remaining 12 patients with increased radioactivity in the abnormal side of the scrotum were all diagnosed with orchiepididymitis through conservative treatment and clinical follow-up, but only 8 of the 12 were correctly and exactly diagnosed by ultrasonography. In the process of diagnosing acute scrotal pain, radionuclide scrotum scintigraphy has obvious advantage over ultrasonography. It also has the advantage of being simple, fast and accurate but without any detrimental effect on the human body.