Washed up: the end of an era for adrenal incidentaloma CT
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Stella, Damien L
Welman, Christopher J
Somasundaram, Arjuna J
Gerstenmaier, Jan F
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Abstract: For over 20 years, the two key tenets of adrenal incidentaloma (AI) evaluation have been the upper threshold of 10 Hounsfield units (HU) on noncontrast CT (ncCT) to delineate benignity, and the utilisation of adrenal washout CT (AWCT) to evaluate those above this cutoff. In light of growing recent evidence that challenges these two traditional principles, as well as re-evaluation of the data that led to their acceptance, we conclude that neither of these mainstays of adrenal CT remains relevant in modern AI diagnostic workup. With an appropriate definition of an incidentaloma and endocrine assessment for the majority of adrenal lesions, our analysis establishes that the use of AWCT should be ceased in the assessment of AIs, and that a 20 HU attenuation threshold for lesions < 4 cm should replace the traditional 10 HU threshold to exclude malignancy in this patient population. We therefore propose new recommendations for the management of AIs based primarily on CT attenuation and lesion size on ncCT. Critical relevance statement: Increasing the CT attenuation threshold to 20 HU for lesions < 4 cm and eliminating washout CT for true adrenal incidentalomas, together with recommendations for endocrine assessment, will significantly decrease the over-investigation of overwhelmingly benign adrenal lesions, whilst confidently excluding malignancy. Key Points: True incidentalomas exclude current or prior extra-adrenal malignancy and clinically suspected adrenal disease. Adrenal washout CT was never proven in the malignancy-sparse true incidentaloma population. Hormonal correlation in parallel with < 20 HU and < 4 cm thresholds of homogeneous lesions on noncontrast CT excludes malignancy.
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Insights into Imaging
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16
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© Crown 2025. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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Seow, JH; Stella, DL; Welman, CJ; Somasundaram, AJ; Gerstenmaier, JF, Washed up: the end of an era for adrenal incidentaloma CT, Insights into Imaging, 2025, 16, pp. 136