This week I observed three vascular surgeries. One of them made me understand that clinical surgery sometime is not predictive. In that case, the patient had 50~99% stenosis in his left popliteal artery (POP). The surgery was planned to use angioplasty to open the POP in order to recover the normal blood circulation in patient's lower left leg. However, during the surgery, the angiograph showed very complicated local geometry of the POP together with an enlarged section of calcified vessel in front of the clotting. The local blood vessel was so narrow that the catheter couldn't pass through. Doctors finally decided to stop the angioplasty and was going to plan another open surgery in several weeks--setting up a bypass. Though it was a minimal-invasive surgery and the patient was only local anesthetic, such unsuccessful experience demonstrated the risk in vascular surgeries.
This week I started my project: using the ultrasound data to analyse the progress of blood flow velocity after placing the stent. The incentive is, there may be a trend that the stent will cause the blood flow velocity change at specific location (in the location of the stent, upstream or downstram) after time. I am gonna selective choose about 20 patients with continueous Low Ext Duplex data after placing a stent, build up my own database and try to analyse the trend based on the data.
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