Vascular Ultrasound

What is vascular ultrasound?

Ultrasound is a widely used technology that manipulates high-frequency sound waves to create images of your internal organs and tissues. The team at Vascular Surgery Associates, LLC, uses vascular ultrasound to assess your veins and arteries.

Ultrasounds are the safest form of diagnostic imaging, as they don't make use of ionizing radiation to produce images. Instead, the machine's transducer – a hand-held instrument – sends out sound waves at a pitch beyond human hearing.

When the sound waves meet your blood vessels, they bounce back or echo, and the ultrasound machine translates this information into moving pictures.

How is the Doppler effect used in vascular ultrasound?

The Doppler effect makes use of the changes that occur in echoing sound waves due to the movement of your blood cells.

Doppler is a key technique in vascular ultrasound that shows how fast your blood flows and its direction. It's the primary method of observing blood moving through your veins and arteries.

Why might I need a vascular ultrasound?

Vascular ultrasound is invaluable for identifying blockages in arteries or veins. A blockage or stenosis could be due to plaque build-up inside the blood vessels that make them narrower, or there could be a blood clot or emboli.

Your provider can confirm the presence of blood clots if they suspect you have a deep vein thrombosis (DVT). They can also evaluate aneurysms – swollen balloons filled with blood that sometimes develop at weak points along your arteries. 

You might need to have a vascular ultrasound before undergoing an angioplasty or to evaluate previous vascular procedures.

The team at Vascular Surgery Associates, LLC, also uses vascular ultrasound to assess conditions like chronic venous insufficiency and varicose veins that result from poorly functioning valves in the blood vessels.

Identifying the cause of circulatory problems is important to ensure you receive the appropriate treatment.

What does a vascular ultrasound procedure involve?

Vascular ultrasound is a straightforward, painless procedure that the team at Vascular Surgery Associates, LLC, performs in-house for your convenience.

During a vascular ultrasound, your specially trained technician passes the transducer (handpiece) over your body. They put slippery gel over your skin, helping the transducer glide smoothly and amplify the sound waves.

Your technician records the echoes that come back as the sound waves hit your blood vessels. The process is entirely non-invasive and doesn't require any anesthetic or sedative. You shouldn't feel any pain; at most, you may experience slight discomfort if it's necessary to press the transducer down firmly at any point.

To benefit from the experience of the Vascular Surgery Associates, LLC team, call their office or book an appointment online today.