Ultrasound Imaging of Superficial Venous Thrombosis in the Upper and Lower Extremities: Closing the Gap Between Clinical Management Guidelines and Ultrasound Practice Parameters.

Superficial venous thrombosis (SVT) of the upper and lower extremities has long been considered a relatively benign condition. But in recent years, the literature has suggested a benefit to anticoagulation in patients with certain thrombus characteristics (size, location, and distance to deep venous system) resulting in updates to clinical guidelines for the treatment of lower extremity SVT. Despite these now well-established guidelines, there remains a paucity of guidance from national and international societies regarding the imaging of superficial veins when evaluating for venous thrombosis. We recommend potential strategies to close this gap.

Shake No Bake: A Homemade Ultrasound Gel Recipe for Low-Resource Settings.

Commercially produced ultrasound coupling gel is often a scarce resource in rural regions of low-income countries that use sonography as their main imaging modality and, when available, may be cost prohibitive. Various homemade gels were created and tested to assure image quality was not compromised. Glucomannan-based gel and guar gum-based gel had superior physical properties in initial testing and showed no substantial difference compared with commercially available ultrasound gel on subject and phantom imaging and analysis (P > .05 using a 1-tailed sign test). Neither gel required heating, attracted insects, damaged ultrasound transducers, stained samples of clothing, or had harmful effects to subjects.