The ugly face of deep vein thrombosis: Phlegmasia Cerulea Dolens-Case report.

INTRODUCTION: Phlegmasia Cerulea Dolens (PCD), a rare & life-threatening condition caused by a massive deep venous thrombosis that is associated with arterial occlusion caused by the subsequent compartment syndrome. CASE PRESENTATION: A 56-year-old male was diagnosed as a case of extensive left femoral DVT & pulmonary embolism. Two days after being managed by systemic thrombolytics & heparin, his condition worsened as he developed cyanosis of the affected limb, compartment syndrome & foot drop so he was referred to our facility for further management. CT venogram showed a thrombosis of the left popliteal vein extending into the left common iliac vein confirming the diagnosis of PCD & May-Turner syndrome. We adopted a limb preserving approach using a pharmacomechanical catheter directed thrombolysis (PCDT). The patient recovered fully with a complete resolution of his foot drop. DISCUSSION: Several treatment options have been suggested to improve the outcomes of PCD, but due to the rarity of this condition a gold standard treatment is still controversial. But regardless of the chosen approach, there is an urgent need to decrease the thrombus burden to prevent further adverse sequelae like amputation or even death which can be achieved by using PCDT as it was demonstrated in our case. CONCLUSION: Our case shows that a rare entity of DVT as PCD could be a result of improper management of acute proximal DVT in the background of anatomical variabilities & that despite the late presentation of such a rare condition there still a role for a limb preserving approach with endovascular techniques.

Fluence-to-effective dose conversion coefficients from a Saudi population based phantom for monoenergetic photon beams from 10 keV to 20 MeV.

Fluence-to-dose conversion coefficients are important quantities for radiation protection, derived from Monte Carlo simulations of the radiation particles through a stylised phantom or voxel based phantoms. The voxel phantoms have been developed for many ethnic groups for their accurate reflection of the anatomy. In this study, we used the Monte Carlo code MCNPX to calculate the photon fluence-to-effective dose conversion coefficients with a voxel phantom based on the Saudi Arabian male population. Six irradiation geometries, anterior-posterior (AP), posterior-anterior (PA), left lateral (LLAT), right lateral (RLAT), rotational (ROT) and isotropic (ISO) were simulated for monoenergetic photon beams from 10 keV to 20 MeV. We compared the coefficients with the reference values in ICRP Publication 116. The coefficients in the AP and PA geometries match the reference values to 9% and 12% on average as measured by root mean square while those in the LLAT, RLAT ROT and ISO geometries differ, mostly below, from the reference by 23, 22, 15 and 16%, respectively. The torso of the Saudi phantom is wider than the ICRP reference male phantom and likely to cause more attenuation to the lateral beam. The ICRP reference coefficients serve well for the Saudi male population as conservative estimations for the purpose of radiation protection.