Evaluating peripheral vascular injuries: is color Doppler enough for diagnosis?

Background: Vascular injury poses a serious threat to limb and life. Thus, diagnosis should be made immediately with minimally invasive methods. Doppler is a good aid in diagnosis of vascular injury.

Methods: The present prospective study was conducted on 150 patients who presented with soft signs (the signs which are suggestive but not confirmatory) of vascular injury. They were subjected to color Doppler examination before exploration. The patients with the features of vascular injury on color Doppler were subjected to exploration. On the other hand, those who had normal Doppler were subjected to CT- angiography. Then, the findings of the exploration were matched with those of color Doppler. The data were analyzed using the SPSS statistical software.

Results: Out of the 150 Doppler examinations, 110 (73.33%) were reported as positive, while 40 were reported as negative for vascular injury. These were subjected to CT-angiography and seven of them had the features of vascular injury on CT-angiography. All the patients with positive Doppler or CT angiography findings were subjected to exploration. Doppler had a sensitivity of 94% and specificity of 82.5% in diagnosis of vascular injury using Binary classification test.

Conclusions: Color Doppler is an easily available, reliable, and handy method of diagnosing a vascular injury. It has a very high sensitivity and specificity in diagnosis of vascular injuries.