[Contribution of vascular ultrasonic studies for the study of kidney diseases in children. Société francophone de recherche en pédiatrie].

The proximity of child's kidneys from the cutaneous surface allows a particularly sensitive exploration by doppler sonography, which in addition has the major advantage of being a non-invasive, non-irradiating and painless technique. However there are two limitations to this technique: the lack of cooperation of some children and the still limited availability of high quality equipment in intensive care units. Indeed most of the applications described in this paper (i.e., pyelonephritis, renovascular hypertension, tumors, acute renal insufficiency and renal vein thrombosis) require, besides an experienced operator, expensive power doppler equipment including high frequency and high resolution probes.