Upper abdominal trauma in children: imaging evaluation.

One hundred consecutive children with serious blunt upper-abdominal injury were evaluated prospectively to assess the accuracy and usefulness of emergency computed tomography (CT) compared with liver-spleen scintigraphy and sonography. Ninety-five hemodynamically stable patients were imaged. The results of this 20-month study indicate that CT has fewer false negatives and false positives than scintigraphy or sonography, that CT is useful in abdominal trauma, and that CT provides the most information of any single diagnostic imaging test commonly available.