[Possibilities and limits of extracranial vascular diagnosis with conventional echography]

Abstract

Background: For the extracranial and partial intracranial diagnosis of vessels Doppler ultrasonography has been the method of choice since a long time. If not the phenomenon of flow, but anatomical structures are of interest, or biopsy is planned, the conventional ultrasonography is often under-estimated.

Patients and methods: A detection of the superficial temporal artery and its branches was performed in a clinical study of 50 patients by using a 10 Mhz ultrasonic system. The ultrasonic findings were correlated with clinical findings.

Results: The vessel course, the vessel was detectable diameter, plaques and stenosis and the perivascular tissue.

Conclusions: The availability of conventional ultrasonic tools provides the possibility to achieve a fast first documentation of the extracranial vessels in a lot of inflammatory and arteriosclerotic diseases.