Diagnosing urinary tract abnormalities: Intravenous urography or CT urography?

Abstract

For many years, intravenous urography (IVU) was the modality of choice for diagnosing urinary tract abnormalities. IVU has many drawbacks including poor diagnostic accuracy in diagnosis and characterization of parenchymal lesions, also in cases of nonfunctioning kidneys. It has little diagnostic role to detect the cause of obstruction in absence of radio-opaque stones along the course of the urinary tract (UT). In the last two decades, with the era of the computed tomography (CT), CT has become the gold standard for diagnosis of urinary stones, while multiphasic CT urography (CTU) has become the most useful diagnostic tool in different UT abnormalities including complex congenital anomalies, trauma, infection and tumors. Also, the "one-stop-shop" use of CTU in different anomalies including vascular, parenchymal, and urothelial evaluation has a great impact in management of patients. CT has many disadvantages over IVU including its high cost and the higher radiation dose but it is more effective than IVU. © 2014 Abou El-Ghar et al. This work is published by Dove Medical Press Limited.