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

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.