Reliability and Validity Study of Clinical Ultrasound Imaging on Lateral Curvature of Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis

Non-ionizing radiation imaging assessment has been advocated for the patients with adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS). As one of the radiation-free methods, ultrasound imaging has gained growing attention in scoliosis assessment over the past decade. The center of laminae (COL) method has been proposed to measure the spinal curvature in the coronal plane of ultrasound image. However, the reliability and validity of this ultrasound method have not been validated in the clinical setting.To evaluate the reliability and validity of clinical ultrasound imaging on lateral curvature measurements of AIS with their corresponding magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measurements.-test, Bland–Altman statistics and Pearson correlation coefficient. The level of significance was set as 0.05.The COL method showed high intra- and inter-rater reliabilities (both with ICC (2, K) >0.9, p<0.05) to measure the coronal curvature. Compared with Cobb method, COL method showed no significant difference (p<0.05) when measuring coronal curvature. Furthermore, Bland-Altman method demonstrated an agreement between these two methods, and Pearson’s correlation coefficient (r) was high (r>0.9, p