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Renal Vein Thrombosis

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So this is a patient who had a transplant place about

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three days prior to this ultrasound being

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obtained and Transplant was not working well

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until they got an ultrasound to evaluate it and so on the

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grayscale image we can see this right lower quadrinal Transit measures

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about 12.6 centimeters. You can see that there

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is color flow within this transplanted kidney. However, when we

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sort of interrogate the arteries this way form looks very very

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abnormal. Now, there's nice sharp systolic upstroke,

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but look at the diastolic flow completely reversed

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over here.

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And soon we see that finding a reversed

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diastolic flow that suggests that there

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is significant vascular resistance within

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the kidney which may be from a number of causes. It could

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be severe acute tubular necrosis in

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the appropriate time for you could be very very severe acute rejection

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to me even be very severe infection of the kidney

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Pile in ephritis that's causing so much edema resulting in

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increased vascular resistance. However, one of

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the things and this is classically associated with the reverse diastolic flows

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in the renal arteries is renal vein thrombosis.

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And so that's something we're going to have to think about as we interrogate

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this kidney further. Now other areas that we

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look within the kidney also shows the reverse diastolic flow

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showing that this is not just sort of a one-off observation mean

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a portion of the kidney here. There's reverse

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diastolic flow here. There's reversedological so

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both in the upper and lower poles is reverse istolic flow

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very very abnormal waveform.

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Now we look around the kidney. We are seeing collections as well.

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And sometimes when you see large collections pressing upon

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the kidney with Mass Effect, you could also result in Reverse

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diastolic flow. But in this instance while they are a large,

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they don't seem to be indenting the kidney. They don't seem to be having sort of

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a subcapsular component to it rather just sort of perinecric.

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And we sort of then evaluate the remainder of this kidney.

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you know, even when we look at some of the

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I mean real arteries. We're seeing this reverse diastolic flow.

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So all that is consistent with something that's

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causing massive amount of vascular resistance within the

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kidney and finally, you know, we need to look at the main renal

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vein.

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Despite our best efforts on color Doppler Imaging and now

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power doppler everything which is much more sensitive. We're just not

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seeing the main renal vein. And in fact, when we look at the external iliac

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vein beyond the expected preach in

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the last to Moses were actually seeing from this within it,

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right. There's no flow here. There's all these low level Echoes within

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it and so in this instance, there was

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a thrombus within the external iliac vein that extended

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into the main renal vein of the transplant. That's

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kidney resulting in renal vein thrombosis and

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then the resultant manifestation for

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verse diastolic flow within the

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renal artery itself.

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Now renaline thrombosis is quite uncommon. You typically

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see it in about the first five days, but even

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within that particularly the first two days from the post-operative period

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and you're really just looking for thrombus within

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the main renal Lane associated with this sort of secondary findings of

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reverse diastolic flow within the intraprenchymal vessels

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in the renal transplant.

Report

Faculty

Mahan Mathur, MD

Associate Professor, Division of Body Imaging; Vice Chair of Education, Dept of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging

Yale School of Medicine

Tags

Vascular

Ultrasound

Kidneys

Idiopathic

Iatrogenic

Genitourinary (GU)

Body