What can cranial color Doppler ultrasonography reveal?

Some patients go to the hospital for examination when they often feel headaches. Doctors usually recommend patients to do a color Doppler ultrasound of the head, because this helps to observe whether there are some extra substances in the patient's brain. There are many reasons for headaches, which may be caused by tumors in the brain. So what can the color Doppler ultrasound of the head check?

Color Doppler ultrasound of the head uses the principle of sound wave imaging. It is difficult for ultrasound to penetrate dense bone tissue such as the skull, so color Doppler ultrasound of the head uses the gaps in the skull to observe the blood vessels inside the skull. It can observe the anterior cerebral artery, middle cerebral artery, and posterior cerebral artery, whether the walls of the vessels are smooth, and observe the blood flow velocity, blood flow direction, and elasticity of the blood vessel walls. It is of great value in the diagnosis of stenosis and occlusion of brain blood vessels. Color Doppler ultrasound of the head can also screen intracranial lesions in newborns, such as hydrocephalus, cerebral hemorrhage, brain herniation and other diseases.

Abnormal results:

(1) The quality of real-time ultrasound images of the brain is greatly affected by the skull. So far, the application of ultrasound imaging is mainly limited to infants and newborns under 2 years old whose fontanelles have not yet closed.

(2) Transcranial real-time ultrasound may have certain application value in the diagnosis and interventional treatment of brain abscesses and intracranial space-occupying lesions in adolescents and certain individuals.

(3) Color ultrasound and transcranial Doppler (TCD): examine the carotid artery, vertebral artery and their lesions, and detect intracranial arterial blood flow. It is widely used to examine various diseases such as cerebrovascular malformations and arterial stenosis.

People who need to be examined: Intracranial hemorrhage: patients with symptoms such as neonatal intracranial hemorrhage, subdural hemorrhage, subarachnoid hemorrhage, and children under 2 years old with open fontanelles.