POST-HAEMORRHAGIC VENTRICULAR DILATATION: ARE TRADITIONAL ULTRASOUND MEASUREMENTS THE IDEAL TOOLS FOR DECIDING SURGERY? André M. Graca1, Hugo Cavaco1, José Pedro Lavrador2, Kátia Cardoso1, Carlos Moniz1 1Serviço
de Neonatologia – Departamento de Pediatria and 2Serviço de Neurocirurgia - Departamento de Neurociências Hospital de Santa Maria – CHLN / Centro Académico de Medicina de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal
[email protected]
INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES Despite the limitations attributed to Levene ventricular index (LVI) (Levene 1981) for evaluating
used routinely.
post-hemorrhagic ventricular dilatation (PHVD), it is still the most widely used method to assess
Coronal ventricular area (CVA), despite being easily measured with modern scanners or
ventricular dimensions and to determine the indication for CSF drainage (Brouwer 2012).
workstations and having published reference ranges (Saliba 1990), is not a popular tool. The aim of
Other linear measurements of the lateral ventricles have been suggested: the anterior horn width
this study is to evaluate the role of less frequently used measurements for evaluating PHVD patients
– AHW (London 1980) and the thalamo-occipittal distance – TOD (Davies 2000), but those are not
undergoing surgery.
METHODS 1. We assessed prospectively a healthy cohort of very preterm infants
