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Subclavian Artery Measurements Case Review

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In this video,

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I'm gonna review how to obtain subclavian artery measurements using three D

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software. With this particular three D software, we have, uh,

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created a curve planar image,

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which goes through the entire left subclavian artery for this example.

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And you can see that we can spin around it just like a typical curve planar

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reformat. You can spin around it in all different directions. First,

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you can take a look at the vessel.

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You can use this spin to assess the degree of calcification,

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which in this case I certainly would call mild in this particular case.

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You can use this three d reformat to assess calcification and tortuosity as you

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can do on many, uh, of these different, um, software systems. And in this case,

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I think there's not really any significant tortuosity and very mild

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calcification. So let's take a look again at the curve planer.

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So usually when you're assessing the subclavian arteries,

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there's two spots where you're most likely to encounter significant narrowing.

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The first is at the origin from the aortic arch.

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And you can see in this patient from the short axis view here,

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I can blow that up,

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that there is some calcification at the origin from the aortic arch.

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And this particular software does some automated measurements.

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It segments out the actual vessel diameters and gives you the minimum and

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maximum measurements.

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And this overlay is the size of the catheter you can put in through this vessel.

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So we don't tend to report the, the catheter size,

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we just report the minimum and the maximum measurements. So in this case,

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the minimum is eight and a half, maximum 14.

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So certainly large enough to accommodate whatever catheter they want to place.

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The other trouble spot that you'll often find for the SubCal arteries is right

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between the first rib and the clavicle. So let's see, as we scroll up,

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we should see right here, you can see there's the clavicle coming in.

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Here's the first rib.

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There's actually a lot of space in this particular patient,

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so no real issues there.

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But you can see in some patients this space between the first rib and clavicle

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is much more narrow and you might get some compression of the vessel there.

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So here you can, as we hover,

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we see that the diameters of brown six millimeters for the minimum.

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So that looks pretty good. So in this particular case,

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most likely in, you know,

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what you tend to do is just sort of scroll through and look visually for any,

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um, significant areas of narrowing, and then measure the minimum. In this case,

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I would measure a minimum for the subclavian artery as I scroll through of

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around five millimeters. And that's, uh, way distal at the axillary region.

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Usually where they're gonna go insert their catheters is right around

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the, the edge, um, here, sort of like the lateral clavicle area.

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So usually, uh, diameters out here in the aary region aren't quite as important.

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So for their purposes,

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I think the minimum is around the six millimeter range for this particular case,

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based on the diameters that we see as we scroll through the areas around the

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level of the clavicle.

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Faculty

Stefan Loy Zimmerman, MD

Associate Professor of Radiology and Radiological Science

Johns Hopkins Medicine Department of Radiology and Radiological Science

Tags

Vascular

Neuro

Idiopathic

Congenital

Cardiac valves

Cardiac CT (SCCT Cat B1 Video Case)

Cardiac

CTA

CT

Acquired/Developmental