Department of Radiology, Cheil General Hospital & Women's Healthcare Center, Kwandong University College of Medicine, Korea. radsmj@msn.com
Published online: June 1, 2011.
ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, women's health clinicians have witnessed a shift of the paradigm for the approach to prenatal screening for chromosomal abnormalities. From an emphasis on age-based invasive diagnostic tests, women are now being offered a variety of noninvasive screening tests. Although there is exciting research and innovation in the field of noninvasive testing for fetal aneuploidy, there are currently two tests, and both are invasive, that are used in a routine manner to determine the presence of fetal aneuploidy: chorionic villous sampling and amniocenthesis. The aim of this review was to investigate the effectiveness of prenatal sonography, including first trimester nuchal translucency screening and second trimester genetic sonography, for obtaining valid chromosomal abnormality screening test results.