Document Type
Article
Rights
Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence
Abstract
Objective: The objective of the study was to investigate whether clinically used ultrasonic contrast agents improved the accuracy of spectral Doppler ultrasound in the detection of low grade (< 50%) renal artery stenosis. Low grade stenoses in the renal artery are notoriously difficult to reliably detect using Doppler ultrasound due to difficulties such as overlying fat and bowel gas.
Methods: A range of anatomically-realistic renal artery phantoms with varying low degrees of stenosis (0, 30 and 50%) were constructed and peak velocity data was measured from within the pre-stenotic and mid-stenotic regions in each phantom, for both unenhanced and contrast-enhanced spectral Doppler data acquisitions. The effect of a 20mm overlying fat layer on the ultrasound beam distortion and phase aberration, and hence on the measured peak velocity data, was also investigated.
Results: The overlying fat layer produced a statistically significant underestimation (p
Conclusion: Contrast-enhanced Doppler ultrasound could significantly assist in the early detection of renal artery disease.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ultras.2019.04.003
Recommended Citation
Browne, Jacinta E., et al. (2019) "An investigation of the detection capability of pulsed wave duplex Doppler of low grade stenosis using ultrasound contrast agent microbubbles–an in-vitro study." Ultrasonics 96(2019) 48-54. doi.org/10.1016/j.ultras.2019.04.003
Funder
Royal Society and Research Support Unit DIT
Publication Details
Ultrasonics 96(2019) 48-54