Digital tomosynthesis (DT) is found to be a fine method to assess the radiographic changes in gout patients. But the further researches are required to apply DT to actual clinical settings. Chronic gout is characterized by typical radiographic changes, which were earlier detected by radiographic diagnostic techniques like plain radiography, and computed tomography (CT). But a new technology digital tomosynthesis (DT) has come up with some promising results.

A study was conducted recently to compare DT, CT and plain radiography to evaluate changes in feet of patients with chronic gouty arthritis.

For this, two independent radiologists studied all the plain radiography, DT, and CT images of 30 male patients having gout. The Sharp-van der Heijde scoring method was used for scoring the degrees of erosion and joint space narrowing in 18-foot joints. These joints were four proximal interphalangeal and one interphalangeal joint of the first toe, five metatarsophalangeal, five tarsometatarsal, and three naviculo-cuneiform joints of the foot.

The results revealed that high reproducibility [0.929 for intraobserver intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and 0.838 for interobserver ICC] was shown by DT. DT showed similar results to those of CT but its results came out to be superior to those of plain radiography for evaluating the radiographic damage. This suggests the probability of applying DT to actual clinical settings after more researches.