BACKGROUND We designed this study to expand the usage of ultrasound to detect early occurrence of hypovolemia. We explore the potential use of inferior vena cava (IVC) and abdominal aorta (AA) diameter index (IVC:AA) measured ultrasonographically to detect class 1 hypovolemic shock with blood loss less than 15%.ᅟ METHODS The aim of this study was to determine the changes in the diameter of in...

Herein, we present the case of a patient with recurrent hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) who had paracaval lymph node (LN) metastases with an inferior vena cava (IVC) tumor thrombus after a hepatectomy. A 65-year-old man with chronic hepatitis B virus infection received an extended anterior segmentectomy because of two hepatic tumors, located in segments 7 and 8. Histological examination of both ...

OBJECTIVE Extracardiac conduit Fontan procedure (ECFP) using Gore-Tex graft has been performed with increasing frequency for the patients with functional single ventricle. However, lack of growth potential and longevity of the conduit are consistent concerns and main points of criticism of the ECFP. In this study, we investigated the mid-term status of the Gore-Tex graft used in the ECFP by com...

OBJECTIVES The study evaluated the safety and efficacy of stent reconstruction of stenotic/occluded iliofemoral veins (IFV) and inferior vena cava (IVC). BACKGROUND Patients with congenital heart defects and stenotic or occluded IFV/IVC may encounter femoral venous access problems during future cardiac surgeries or catheterizations. METHODS Twenty-four patients (median age 4.9 years) underw...

BACKGROUND In the trauma population, patients with physiologic compromise may present with "normal" vital signs. We hypothesized that the inferior vena cava (IVC) diameter could be used as a surrogate marker for hypovolemic shock and predict mortality in severely injured trauma patients. METHODS A retrospective cohort study was performed at a Level I trauma center on 161 severely injured adul...

PURPOSE To test the diagnostic power of Pocket Size Imaging Device (PSID) in detecting early signs of right heart (RH) involvement in regular smokers (RS) free of overt cardiac involvement. METHODS One-hundred-forty-three regular smokers and 51 healthy controls, comparable for age and sex, underwent physical exam (PE), PSID exam and standard echocardiography. Based on a simplified Boston scor...

Focused echocardiography is increasingly used by clinicians to guide fluid resuscitation. The UK Defence Medical Services (DMS) have adopted focused echocardiography as a tool to guide flow assessment and resuscitation in deployed critical care. We aimed to explore whether two focused echo techniques, namely Inferior Vena Cava (IVC) and Left Ventricular Outflow Tract Velocity Time integer (LVOT...

To evaluate the clinical and histopathological effects of presurgical treatment with sunitinib on inferior vena cava (IVC) tumor thrombus. Between 2010 and 2014, we treated seven patients with renal cell carcinoma and IVC tumor thrombus presurgically with sunitinib. We retrospectively evaluated primitive tumor size, the level of tumor thrombus according to Novick's classification, its distance ...

In the previous issue of Critical Care, Muller and colleagues investigated whether respiratory variation in inferior vena cava diameter (ΔIVC) could be a useful predictor of fluid responsiveness in spontaneously breathing patients. The study concludes that accuracy was not very good and therefore that this parameter should be used with caution in these patients. There is still confusion about t...