Interactive Transcript
0:00
10 month old girl with diarrhea and abdominal pain.
0:05
Let me,
0:08
I'm going to show you two sets of images here,
0:14
one after the other,
0:18
so in the right lower quadrant. So,
0:21
because the patient presented with abdominal pain and fever and there was
0:24
suspicion of appendicitis, um,
0:27
we started with the right lower quadrant which showed thick bowel loops.
0:34
That's the left lower quadrant with thickened bowel loops.
0:38
There is fluid in the bowel.
0:42
Mid abdominal showed the same thing, mild bowel wall thickening.
0:45
And as we look at the liver, it looks very heterogeneous,
0:52
very heterogeneous with areas of hypo and hyper ity.
0:56
On color doppler, there was normal quarter flow,
1:00
but the liver showed normal vascularity did not show any abnormal vascularity.
1:05
That's the kidney, that's the spleen.
1:09
Spleen was not enlarged
1:14
and we intervened. We thought there is something wrong.
1:18
And we repeated the scan after the patient got admitted and after
1:24
six hours there was magic. The s liver looked absolutely normal.
1:28
So within six hours from a severe
1:32
heterogeneity of the liver, this liver now looks normal. Again.
1:37
The vascularity on colored Doppler examination was normal.
1:39
There was no mass or mass effect. Gall bladder is normal.
1:43
All the rest of the organs were normal. No free fluid. The bladder was normal.
1:46
Everything was normal. So let's bring up the poll question.
1:52
So what could it be? It could be, could it be infiltrative tumor,
1:56
could it be ous gas?
1:58
Could it be artifact or could be storage disorder?
2:04
Uh, unfortunately that's not ous air.
2:07
There was bowel wall thickening, but we never saw air in the bowel wall.
2:11
There was no intramural air. This was from dehydration.
2:15
The patient had diarrhea, had gastroenteritis,
2:19
very slow flow within the hepatic vasculature from rule
2:24
formation dehydration that led to that artifact. Typically,
2:29
we see that artifact in the large veins with obstructive changes,
2:32
especially in patients who have D V T et cetera will have slow flow in the large
2:36
veins. The same concept we need to apply when we look at the organ system on
2:41
ultrasound, especially on grayscale images. If there is very slow flow,
2:45
you see that those alternate bands you saw on the initial ultrasound.
2:51
So those hypoechoic areas and hyper alternate areas.
2:54
So hyper echoic areas where the, uh, blood cells which
2:58
Were, are traveling very slow within the hepatic vasculature.
3:02
After the patient got rehydrated IV infusion was done for six hours
3:07
and we imaged the liver again, it was normal.
3:11
So Porto's gas, um,
3:14
typically is more hyper echoic and will show discreet areas of
3:18
hyper ity with post caustic dirty shadowing. I'm,
3:22
I'm to say dirty shadowing from the air bubbles. And you'll also see,
3:27
uh, air, intramural air when we, when you look at the bowel.
3:31
So very tricky case. Um, the patient was, mine had, uh,
3:35
mild elevation of LFTs, uh, next day, but did extremely well.
3:40
So that's a rule formation. RBCs,
3:43
they clumped together and they traveled together in the, uh, in the, uh,
3:47
vessels very slowly leading to that kind of artifact. So, um,
3:52
it was fixed after rehydrating the kid.